July 12—Sts. Louis Martin and Azélie-Marie “Zélie” Guérin, Holy Man and Holy Woman

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They are the only married couple canonized together.  Both tried to enter religious life but were rejected.  They married three months after meeting each other.  Both entered marriage with the intention of living as St. Joseph and St. Mary did.  Nonetheless, they did want children and their confessor guided them.  So, they became parents to nine children with five daughters surviving and eventually entering religious life, one of whom is St. Thérèse of Lisieux.  They were successful in business; Louis being a watchmaker who quit his career to manage his wife’s more successful lace-making business.  St. Zelie died of breast cancer at the age of 45, while St. Louis died from a heart attack after a lengthy illness brought about by strokes when he was 70, surviving his wife by 17 years.  

However, there was more to their lives than just living, working, raising a family, and dying.  They were holy and devoted their lives to God through living, working, raising a family, and dying.  We know quite a bit about them from his 16 letters and her 216 letters.  She wrote to one daughter:  “As for me, I wished to have many children so that I could raise them for Heaven.”  She had great love and affection for her husband as well:  “I always get what I want without a fight; there's still a month before you go (on retreat); that's enough time for me to change your father's mind ten times.”  The years after her death were hard on him, especially after the strokes, when he suffered delirium.  When he could, he would repeat:  “Everything for the greater glory of God,” and “I have never been humiliated in my life, I need to be humiliated.”  Here are models for modern families!  Sts. Louis and Zélie Martin, pray for us.

*https://www.ncregister.com/blog/the-holy-lives-and-passions-of-sts-louis-and-zelie-martin

June 26-St. Josemaría Escrivá: Priest

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Is Opus Dei a secret cult?  Does it exert control over its members?  Does it promote physical penances?  Who is the man who founded it and why?  If we just recently read or watched The DaVinci Code these could be worthwhile questions.  That is, if we accept that it is a historical documentary, which it isn’t; it is pulp fiction and much of what is portrayed about Opus Dei is fiction.  

Opus Dei is a personal prelature of the Catholic Church, meaning it is an institution under the direct governance of the Vatican, rather than under a local bishop or head of a religious order.  Its members include about 93,000 laypersons and about 2,000 priests with about 70% of members living in private homes, leading family lives with secular careers and 30% living celibate lives in Opus Dei centers.  Self-mortification is an ancient Catholic practice—think fasting and abstinence for Lent—but it is promoted as a part of a person’s total life.  

St. Josemaría Escrivá, who founded the society in 1928 in Madrid, Spain, wrote, “Choose mortifications that don’t mortify others.”  In other words, do penance that will lead oneself and others to love of God.  St. Josemaría founded Opus Dei to help people become holy through sanctifying ordinary life.  “Saint Josemaría explained that Christians working in the world should not live ‘a kind of double life.  On the one hand, an interior life, a life of union with God; and on the other, a separate and distinct professional, social and family life.’  On the contrary:  ‘There is just one life, made of flesh and spirit.  And it is this life which has to become, in both soul and body, holy and filled with God.”  This is the essence of the Catholic life; what we are called to be and do! 

* https://www.flickr.com/photos/opus-dei/13599152113

June 6—Bl. Maria Laura Mainetti, Religious and Martyr

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Sr. Maria Laura Mainetti was declared Blessed on June 6, 2021, the anniversary of her murder in 2000 by three teenage girls, former catechism students of hers. She was stabbed 19 times, the intent being for each one to stab her six times to represent the number 666. They originally told investigators they wanted to kill her for a game, but later said it was a satanic sacrifice. All three girls were convicted and sentenced as juveniles and released by 2008. They have since changed their names and relocated to other cities, starting families. 

 Sr. Mainetti was the superior of the Sisters of the Cross convent in Chiavenna in the Italian Alps, north of Milan. She was well known for her ministry to youth and poor people. She was lured to a park because one of the girls claimed to be considering an abortion. They made her kneel, beat her with a brick and pushed her head into a wall and stabbed her to death. Throughout the attack Sr. Mainetti prayed for them and asked God to forgive them. Her last words were, “Lord, forgive them.” She was declared a martyr by Pope Francis. 

 One of the girls later wrote a letter to Sr. Mainetti’s religious community: “I can have of her only a memory of love. And in addition to this, it also allowed me to believe in something that is neither God nor Satan, but which was a simple woman who defeated evil. Now in her I find comfort and the grace to endure everything. I always pray and I am sure she will help me become a better person.” This is as enduring a testimony as any to the power of God’s love as shown through God’s witness and martyr, Bl. Maria Laura Mainetti.

*https://catholicsaints.info/blessed-maria-laura-mainetti/

Second Friday after Trinity Sunday—Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus

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The heart is a common symbol of love in our day, used in song and poetry, as well as everyday speech. So, it should be no surprise that the Church has a feast day dedicated to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, the one who loves us beyond love. The most significant promoter of the devotion to the Sacred Heart was St. Margraret Mary Alacoque of France in the 17th century. She received apparitions of the Sacred Heart and promoted its devotion. 

The first papal approval came from Pope Innocent VI in 1353 when he instituted a Mass in honor of the Sacred Heart. Pope Pius IX authorized the feast for the whole Church in 1856. Pope Leo XIII decreed a consecration of the world to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in 1899 as well as First Friday Devotions. Pope Pius XII wrote a letter instructing the Church on the devotion to the Sacred Heart in 1956 and Pope Benedict XVI reaffirmed the importance of this devotion in 2006. 

Pope Benedict wrote, “When we practice this devotion, not only do we recognize God's love with gratitude but we continue to open ourselves to this love so that our lives are ever more closely patterned upon it. God, who poured out his love ‘into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us’ (cf. Rom 5: 5), invites us tirelessly to accept his love. The main aim of the invitation to give ourselves entirely to the saving love of Christ and to consecrate ourselves to it is, consequently, to bring about our relationship with God. This explains why the devotion, which is totally oriented to the love of God who sacrificed himself for us, has an irreplaceable importance for our faith and for our life in love.”

*https://live.staticflickr.com/2327/2317894926_8585f50d6b_c.jpg

March 19—Solemnity of St. Joseph, Husband of the Blessed Virgin Mary

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Pope Francis has proclaimed a special “Year of St. Joseph.” This is in honor of the 150th anniversary of Blessed Pope Pius IX’s declaration of St. Joseph as Patron of the Universal Church. This provides “a wonderful opportunity to increase our love for St. Joseph and knowledge, ‘to encourage us to implore his intercession and to imitate his virtues and his zeal.’” It also offers many resources, catechetical material, and prayers/devotions to assist us in our celebration of the special year at https://www.usccb.org/saint-joseph.

One of those resources is his Apostolic Letter, Patris Corde, which means, “With a father’s heart.” He writes: “With a father’s heart: that is how Joseph loved Jesus, whom all four Gospels refer to as ‘the son of Joseph.’” He further writes, “I would like to share some personal reflections on this extraordinary figure, so close to our human experience. … My desire to do so increased during these months of pandemic, when we experienced, amid the crisis, how ‘our lives are woven together and sustained by ordinary people, people often overlooked. … How many fathers, mothers, grandparents and teachers are showing our children, in small everyday ways, how to accept and deal with a crisis by adjusting their routines, looking ahead and encouraging the practice of prayer. How many are praying, making sacrifices and interceding for the good of all.’ Each of us can discover in Joseph – the man who goes unnoticed, a daily, discreet and hidden presence – an intercessor, a support and a guide in times of trouble. Saint Joseph reminds us that those who appear hidden in the shadows can play an incomparable role in the history of salvation. A word of recognition and of gratitude is due to them all.” Take some time this Lent to read more.  St. Joseph, pray for us.

*https://www.usccb.org/saint-joseph

February 21--St. Peter Damian, Monk, Bishop, and Doctor of the Church

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The Church is holy due to Jesus, not us. We are still sinners. We live in a time when some priests and bishops have committed grave public sins. In the eleventh century, there were also serious sins of sexual immorality and crimes of corruption committed by the clergy. One who championed the good and right against such deviations from chastity and holiness was our saint, St. Peter Damian.

Born about 1007 in Ravenna, Italy, Peter was the youngest of a noble, but poor family. Poorly treated by one brother, he was adopted by another brother who was archpriest of Ravenna, who provided him with an education. Peter Damian was gifted in academics and became a university teacher at the age of 25. He left teaching to become a monk. As a monk he was dedicated to austerity and penance, including the discipline of self-flagellation, which he later moderated due to the imprudent zeal of others. He then assisted the Church in opposing the sins of his time as bishop and cardinal.

He was also a great advocate of clerical reform, especially against the corruption of simony, or the buying and selling of Church offices, and clerical sexual license, including concubinage and sodomy. He wrote the book Liber Gomorrhianus, or the Book of Gomorrah, which railed against clerical sins against chastity. Pope Leo IX wrote in response to St. Peter’s work: “Therefore, lest the unrestrained license of filthy lust should spread abroad, it is necessary that it be repelled by a suitable reprimand of apostolic severity and that some attempt at more austere discipline should be made [with them].” St. Peter Damian is a model of how our priests, bishops, and laity should live the gift of chastity. He died about 1072 and was named a Doctor of the Church in 1828.

*https://www.catholic.org/files/images/saints/780.jpg

February 20--Sts. Francisco and Jacinta Marto, Holy Children

                  

Our saints today are proof that age is no barrier to holiness. They were ten and nine when they died from the 1918 influenza pandemic. They are the youngest non-martyrs canonized. St. Jacinta and her brother St. Francisco along with their cousin Lúcia dos Santos were blessed with the apparitions of Our Lady of Fátima on the 13th of each month May through October 1917. Mary asked them to learn to read and write and to pray the rosary “to obtain peace for the world and the end of the war.” They were told to pray for sinners and the conversion of Russia. After the apparitions they practiced austere self-mortifications, such as prostrating themselves to pray for hours or kneeling with their heads on the ground.

Pope Pius XI denied their causes for sainthood because he decided that minors could not fully understand or practice heroic virtue. However, in 1979 the Bishop of Leiria-Fátima asked that the world’s bishops to petition the pope for their causes. The Congregation for the Causes of Saints decided that children could be blessed with the grace to be “spiritual prodigies.” Pope St. John Paul II declared them venerable in 1989 and blessed in 2000. Pope Francis canonized them on May 13, 2017, one hundred years after the first appearance of Mary to them.

Children are gifts from God to their parents. Parents are blessed to be able to share the faith with these new disciples in the haven of the domestic Church, the home. Children are God’s opportunities to bring parents closer to God so the children can also be closer to God. Holiness is both our calling and a grace from God. Sts. Francisco and Jacinta Marto show us that even children can know holiness. May they pray for us and our children.

*https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/ChildrensofFatima_%28croped%29.jpg   Attributed to Joshua Benoliel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons