A few kings have made it into the calendar of saints, including St. Louis IX of France, St. Wenceslaus of Bohemia, and St. Stephen of Hungary. Among them we have today’s saint, St. Henry II of Bavaria, who was Holy Roman Emperor from 1014-1024. As emperor, St. Henry was responsible for maintaining the unity, peace, and stability of the empire. To that extent, he was involved in many military expeditions throughout central Europe and Italy. He established closer ties with the Church and employed clergy as checks to the secular nobility.
He stressed service to the Church, promoted monastic reform, missionary activity, and made many charitable foundations for the poor. He also supported clerical celibacy. At one point he tried to become a monk, but was denied permission by the abbot, being told that his role in life was to be emperor. He succeeded in persuading the pope to include the word “filioque” in the Nicene Creed, which means that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both God the Father and God the Son.
St. Henry seems to be a contradiction regarding sainthood. Although he was devout and supported the Church, he also was a man of his times, engaging in wars and putting down rebellions that attacked his power as king and emperor. This seems to be a contradiction, but it is more about what sainthood really means. It means being holy in the state of life one is in. St. Henry was ambitious. He was political. These are not inherently evil. He used the power of his office to bring about peace and justice to the best of his ability, even when he was wrong. To be a saint means being a disciple of Christ, whether one is a king or a ditch-digger, a queen or a seamstress.
Her last words were, “I forgive Alessandro Serenelli …and I want him with me in heaven forever.” St. Maria Goretti forgave the man who, after trying to rape her, stabbed her fourteen times and killed her. She was eleven years old, the youngest person to be canonized.
St. Maria was the eldest of six children, born into poverty, but deprived of her father at the age of nine by malaria. Because she was the oldest, she had to take care of her siblings while her mother worked in the fields. Serenelli was her next-door neighbor. Alessandro began to harass St. Maria, trying to get her to give into his lustful desires. He stated: “After the second attempt, in my mind was formed more than ever the intention to succeed in the vent of my passion and I conceived the idea to kill her if she continued to resist my cravings.” On July 5, 1902 he confronted St. Maria. She refused, protesting that what he wanted was a mortal sin: “No! It is a sin! God does not want it!” He served 27 years of a 30-year prison sentence and wrote when he was 79 and a Capuchin lay brother: “My behavior was influenced by print, mass-media and bad examples which are followed by the majority of young people without even thinking. And I did the same. I was not worried.”
In the same letter, Alessandro wrote: “I hope this letter that I wrote can teach others the happy lesson of avoiding evil and of always following the right path, like little children. I feel that religion with its precepts is not something we can live without, but rather it is the real comfort, the real strength in life and the only safe way in every circumstance, even the most painful ones of life.” Words to live by from a penitent, saved by a saint.
These men and women were arrested because of their faith in Jesus, and because they were an easy group to blame for the Great Fire of Rome in AD 64. Tacitus, a Roman historian, wrote:
“Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace.… Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.
“Nero offered his gardens for the spectacle, and was exhibiting a show in the circus, while he mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer or stood aloft on a car. Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man's cruelty, that they were being destroyed.”
According to a National Catholic Register article of Jan. 16, 2018, “There are more than 215 million persecuted Christians worldwide, according to the 2018 ‘World Watch List,’ Open Doors USA’s annual ranking of the 50 worst countries for violence and persecution against Christians.” This includes 3,066 Christians killed, 1,252 abducted; 1,020 raped or sexually harassed; and 793 churches attacked.
We need to be aware that martyrdom is not an ancient phenomenon. We need to pray for our brothers and sisters, who are witnessing to our faith. Mary, Mother of Martyrs, pray for us.
Saints come from many ways of life; soldiers, such as St. Martin of Tours and St. Sebastian; aristocratic families and wealth, such as St. Francis Borgia and St. Katherine Drexel; artists, such as St. Catherine of Bologna and St. Luke; or even celebrities, such as St. Bernadette of Lourdes and St. Catherine of Siena. Today’s saint had all those characteristics: St. Albert Chmielowski. St. Albert was born into an aristocratic family near Krakow, Poland in 1845. As Poland had been partitioned three times in the 18th century, many Poles rebelled, including St. Albert. He was part of the January Insurrection of 1863-1864 and lost his leg during a battle. After the uprising, he became a painter and was celebrated as one of the premier artists of Poland.
However, he wanted more from life, namely, to grow closer to God. He became a Third Order Franciscan and was allowed to run Krakow’s homeless shelter. He sold his paintings to pay for improvements. He banned alcohol from the shelter, asked residents to work, taught them working skills, and taught them the Catechism. He set up two religious orders, the Albertine Brothers and Sisters, who were dedicated to serving the poor. St. Albert died in 1916. Pope St. John Paul II was deeply impacted by St. Albert, writing a play about him in 1949, Our God’s Brother, which is about a legendary meeting between St. Albert and Vladimir Lenin.
God calls us wherever we are and in whatever state we are. He calls us to be holy and to come closer to him through our brothers and sisters who are dependent on our efforts. God saves us through others and he calls us to save others through our service to them and our love of them.
Today, we remember the men and women of Poland who offered their lives in witness to their faith. Between 1939 and 1945, 108 bishops, priests, brothers, sisters, and laity were martyred due to the hatred of the faith, odium fidei, the Nazis held toward Catholics. In 1999, when Pope St. John Paul II beatified these faithful, he said:
“Today we are celebrating the victory of those who, in our time, gave their lives for Christ, in order to possess life forever in his glory. This victory has a special character, since it was shared by clergy and laity alike, by young people and old, by people from different classes and states. Among them are Archbishop Antoni Julian Nowowiejski, Pastor of the Diocese of Plock, tortured to death at Dzialdowo; Bishop Wladyslaw Goral of Lublin, tortured with particular hatred simply because he was a Catholic Bishop. There are diocesan and religious priests who died because they chose not to abandon their ministry and because they continued to serve their fellow prisoners who were sick with typhus; some were tortured to death because they defended Jews. In the group of Blessed there are religious brothers and sisters who persevered in the service of charity and in offering their torments for their neighbor. Among the blessed martyrs there are also lay people. There are five young people formed in the Salesian oratory; a zealous activist of Catholic Action, a lay catechist tortured to death for his service and an heroic woman, who give up her own life in exchange for that of her daughter-in-law who was with child. These blessed martyrs are today inscribed in the history of holiness of the People of God on pilgrimage for over a thousand years in the land of Poland.
“If we rejoice today for the beatification of one hundred and eight martyrs, clergy and lay people, we do so above all because they bear witness to the victory of Christ, the gift which restores hope. As we carry out this solemn act, there is in a way rekindled in us the certainty that, independently of the circumstances, we can achieve complete victory in all things through the One who has loved us (cf. Rom 8:37). The blessed martyrs cry to our hearts: Believe in God who is love! Believe in him in good times and bad! Awaken hope! May it produce in you the fruit of fidelity to God in every trial!”
