Nisi Dominus aedificaverit domum, in vanum laborant qui aedificaverunt eam - "Unless the Lord built the house, they worked in vain who built it" Ps. 127
You wouldn't be wrong if you observed that it's becoming increasingly uncomfortable to be a professing Christian in our culture. The good news is, being comfortable or safe has never been part of the job description for a follower of Christ (I'll bet you're feeling better already). In fact, Jesus Himself is very emphatic on this point; this passage from the Gospel of John is just one example::
They will put you out of the synagogues; indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God. And they will do this because they have not known the Father, nor me. But I have said these things to you, that when their hour comes you may remember that I told you of them. (John 16: 2-4)
Japanese Martyrs
We can see that persecution, even in times and places that claim to be Christian, has been more the rule than the exception throughout the history of the Church. Just take a look at the Saints for today (September 10th) at Catholic.org. There are 59 separate entries for today, most of them martyrs. While many of them are from the same persecution in Japan in 1622, a random sampling finds Saints suffering for the Faith throughout the history of the Church. Let's take a look and see how, as they say, the more things change, the more they stay the same . . .
"'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one.' So they are no longer two but one. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder." (Mark 10:7-9)
"Marriage of Mary and Joseph in the Temple" by Luca Giordano, before 1690
When I observed in my recent post "Sins of the Fathers . . .and of Kings" that "one of the greatest contributors to poverty and other debilitating social ills today is the break-down of sexual morality", one reader commented: "It is enough to watch the news or TV for two minutes to realize that our miseries are not due to lack of dollars but to lack of morals." The connection between our sexual conduct and our societal health is impossible to miss, at least for those who aren't heavily invested in the so-called "sexual revolution". It is clear that the societal endorsement of sexual license directly undermines the institution of marriage, and the breakdown of marriage in turn has a profoundly negative impact on children most immediately, and from there on everything and everyone else.
This last point is backed up by an enormous body of research accumulated over decades. I'm not going to delve into that mountain of data here, except to illustrate with a small sample from a 2014 article by posted on the United States National Institute of Health website . . .
Merry Christmas! Today is the 6th Day of Christmas: the Christmas Season is still in its first week.
The Nativity, by Gerard David
The trouble is, it may not feel like Christmas is just beginning. For many years I have had a second job at a local retail store, in the seasonal department. Retailers want to get "seasonal" merchandise on the shelves before the actual season begins, and try to get it out there before their competitors do. As a result, over the past century the commercial “Christmas Season” (now more often called the holiday season) has started earlier and earlier: we are putting Christmas merchandise on the shelves in September, and the Christmas-themed music (mostly about celebrating Christmas, or maybe just the “wonderful time of year”, rather than about the Nativity of Jesus itself) begins blaring out of the stores’ PA systems. They stop receiving Christmas items in early to mid December, and begin selling down their supplies, because once "the holiday” is over (i.e., December 25th . . . what's that holiday called again?) they don’t want to be stuck with a lot of overstock (which means financial losses). The music and decorations are gone when the doors open for business on December 26th. In our post-Christian culture the commercial Christmas season and its advertising sets the tone for the culture as a whole, and so for most people Christmas, sadly, is now over.
But not for those of us who are followers of the Babe Lying in the Manger. Today is only the sixth of eight days in the Octave of Christmas, all with the liturgical status of solemnity; beyond that, the customary “Twelve Days of Christmas” extend until January 5th, followed by the traditional date of the great Feast of Epiphany on the 6th; the formal Christmas Season itself extends until the Baptism of the Lord on January 13th. Some Catholics continue to observe Christmas until the Feast of the Presentation on February 2nd, as did Pope Saint John Paul II, and also my lovely bride’s Polish forebears.
Granted, keeping Christmas when it ought to be kept can be hard, especially when we have all been living and working in an environment reveling in the “holiday spirit” during what was supposed to be the penitential preparatory Season of Advent, and is now wearily going back about its business just when the real celebration is just starting. Fortunately, the Church has given us the Liturgical Calendar, to keep us grounded in the Gospel and the real events of Salvation History. There we find, as we do in the most of the observances of the last few days (the feasts of St. Stephen, Holy Innocents, and usually St. John on the 3rd day of Christmas, although this year the Beloved Apostle yielded to the Holy Family), that the Incarnation points to the Crucifixion, and it is only through the suffering and death of Christ that we come to the Triumph of the Resurrection. Our Celebration of Christmas, then, is not mere revelry in defiance of the cruelty of reality, or a vain attempt to deny it; it is true celebration because we know that, precisely because of that cruel reality, the Child born in Bethlehem has come to take us through the brokenness of this world and beyond to something “no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived” (1 Corinthians 2:9).
A few years ago I set out to keep myself focused on the True Season by posting something related to that particular day for every one of the Twelve Days of Christmas. While I'm no longer engaged in bloggery on a regular basis, I’m keeping up that tradition by rerunning some of my old Christmas posts (with, perhaps, one or two new ones, such as yesterday's on St. Thomas Becket) . Please feel free to join me . . . and have a very Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas! Today we celebrate the 5th Day of Christmas, and also the martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury.
It’s striking how many martyrs' feast days we observe during the Christmas season: St. Stephen on the 2nd Day of Christmas, Holy Innocents yesterday; on Christmas Day itself the Church used to celebrate a second mass, not for the Nativity, but for the martyr St. Anastasia. Today, on the 5th Day of Christmas, we find ourselves celebrating yet another martyr, St. Thomas Becket Archbishop of Canterbury, murdered by knights in the service of King Henry II of England on December 29th, 1170.
The murder of St. Thomas Becket
St. Thomas has attracted the attention of numerous authors over the years: the pilgrims in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are journeying to his shrine; Jean Anouilh wrote a play about him, Becket, which became a successful film starring Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton (see clip below); Becket’s martyrdom is the focus of T.S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral, and the saint has appeared in not a few novels.
In Eliot’s play the soon-to-be-martyred archbishop delivers a Christmas homily in which he discusses this (seemingly) odd juxtaposition between the joy of the Nativity and the mourning of martyrdom:
Not only do we at the feast of Christmas celebrate at once our Lord’s Birth and His Death: but on the next day we celebrate the martyrdom of his first martyr, the blessed Stephen. Is it an accident, do you think, that the day of the first martyr follows immediately the day of the Birth of Christ? By no means. Just as we rejoice and mourn at once, in the Birth and the Passion of Our Lord; so also, in a smaller figure, we both rejoice and mourn in the death of martyrs . . . So thus as on earth the Church mourns and rejoices at once, in a fashion that the world cannot understand; so in Heaven the Saints are most high, having made themselves most low, and are seen, not as we see them, but in the light of the Godhead from which they draw their being.
Eliot’s Becket here is echoing St. Paul, who tells the Corinthians that “the wisdom of this world is folly before God” (1 Corinthians 3:19). Becket himself enjoyed quite a bit of success, in the eyes of the world, prior to becoming archbishop: he was a close companion to King Henry II, and the king’s Chancellor. Henry nominated Thomas to be Archbishop of Canterbury in the hopes that he would subordinate the Church in England to the interests of the Crown. Instead, Becket threw away all the advantages that his friendship with the king brought him and became a champion of the independence of the Church from the Crown. He also seemed to embrace the spiritual life wholeheartedly, surrendering many of the comforts he could legitimately claim as archbishop and giving lavishly to the poor. Some people, at the time and since, have doubted the sincerity of his conversion, but others accepted it as genuine, and it's undeniable that Becket had numerous opportunities to compromise with the king, and so save his life, if he had chosen to do so. The validity of his conversion received further support when the monks who prepared his body discovered that he had been secretly wearing a penitential hair shirt under his episcopal vestments.
Richard Burton as St. Thomas Becket conducts
excommunication rite in the film Becket
In recent years, as government and other powerful social institutions have been encroaching more and more menacingly on the Church, Christians have been turning increasingly to St. Thomas Becket (as well as St. Thomas More, another Thomas martyred by another King Henry three and a half centuries later) as inspiration and intercessor. We do well to remember that both Thomases lost their worldly battles against their respective Henries. And while it is true that Henry II did public penance for the murder of St. Thomas Becket just three years after the fact, Henry VIII never looked back after the execution of St. Thomas More. He never showed any remorse for the seizure or destruction of all the Catholic Church’s properties in England (including the very intentional destruction of both the shrine to St. Thomas Becket in Canterbury and the saint's human remains housed there as relics). Henry shed no tears at the eradication of the Catholic Church itself in his kingdom, and the British Monarch is still the head of the Church of England to this day.
The point is not that we shouldn’t fight to defend the Faith and the Church: we should do so, with all our strength, and call upon the intercession of St. Thomas Becket and all the saints to help us. We cannot, however, pin our hopes on achieving victory over the temporal powers of this world. Thomas Becket is not a Saint because he defeated Henry II, but because he overcame the enormous temptations of power and comfort in this world and remained faithful to Christ, even in the face of certain death.
Which brings us back to where we started - the intimate connection between Christmas and martyrdom. In the Feast of the Nativity we celebrate the birth of Our Savior, who was born expressly to die on The Cross, defeated (apparently) by the temporal powers of the day. Whether or not we win our battles against the Henries, Herods, and Pilates of this world (the wisdom of this world, remember, is folly), the battles that really matter in the long run are not “against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). We celebrate the birth of Christ not because he has conquered Caiaphas or Tiberius Caesar (both of whom, after all, death destroyed centuries ago) but because he has “abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Timothy 1:10).
So, again, Merry Christmas! Gaudete, Christus natus est!
St. Thomas Becket, pray for us!
Egeria Voices chants "Iacet granum oppressum palea", a responsory for the feast of St. Thomas Becket (for a good discussion of this chant, go to this article on Chantblog) - text of the responsory below:
R. Jacet granum oppressum palea, Justus coesus pravorum framea, Coelum domo commutans lutea. V. Cadit custos vitis in vinea, Dux in castris, oultor in area, Coelum domo commutans lutea.
R. The grain of wheat lies smothered by the chaff, the just man slain by the sword of sinners. Changing his house of clay for heaven. V. The vine-keeper dies in his vineyard, the general in his camp, the husbandman on the place of his toil. Changing his house of clay for heaven.
Martyr of England. She was born Margaret Plantagenet, the niece of Edward IV and Richard III. She married Sir Reginald Pole about 1491 and bore five sons, including Reginald Cardinal Pole. Margaret was widowed, named countess of Salisbury, and appointed governess to Princess Mary, daughter of Henry VIII and Queen Catherine of Aragon, Spain. She opposed Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, and the king exiled her from court, although he called her “the holiest woman in England.” When her son, Cardinal Pole, denied Henry’s Act of Supremacy, the king imprisoned Margaret in the Tower of London for two years and then beheaded her on May 28. In 1538, her other two sons were executed. She was never given a legal trial. She was seventy when she was martyred. Margaret was beatified in 1886. (from Butler's Lives of the Saints)
I called my recent piece on St. Julia of Corsica “A Saint For Our Time”; when I think about it, I have yet to find a Saint who isn’t for our times. But today’s Saint, Blessed Margaret Pole, who gave her life in defense of the sanctity of marriage, seems especially suited to the situation of our increasingly post-Christian culture. The niece of two kings, Blessed Margaret was martyred because she refused to applaud publicly the sacrifice of Holy Matrimony to a third king’s lust.
Henry VIII
Blessed Margaret’s antagonist, Henry VIII, could serve as a sort of patron “anti-saint” for our times. He was a man possessed of great gifts: he was given a strong, handsome, athletic body, a quick mind that he applied to writing and musical composition as well as to governing, and was entrusted with the rule of a rich and powerful kingdom. Henry never mastered himself, however, and so his prodigious talents were put at the service, not of his people, but of his equally prodigious cravings for women, wealth, and power. In the end he tried to swallow even the Church. In his later years his grossly obese body became a living image of his insatiable appetites.
People come and go, but human nature doesn’t change. King Henry is long gone, but his imitators are still with us. Like Henry, they are not satisfied with mere tolerance or tacit assent: they require full-throated public approval, and so the Margaret Poles must be silenced. Nobody is literally being led to the block, thankfully, and pray God it never comes to that. Nevertheless, as we have seen over and over again, those who stand up for Church, family, and traditional moral norms today, even if they do so privately, can expect to have their character blackened and their livelihoods threatened.
I have often heard Blessed Margaret’s younger and much better known contemporary, St. Thomas More, proposed as a Patron Saint for our times because of his martyrdom in defense of the Church and Marriage. Like him, Blessed Margaret's firm reliance on Christ's loving care gave her the strength to stand fast in face of mortal threats, and the serenity not to be swallowed up in bitterness against her persecutors. We would do well to invoke Blessed Margaret Pole along with St. Thomas More, and to pray for her intercession against the ravenous spirit of Henry VIII that yet again threatens both Faith and Family.
An earlier version of this Worth Revisiting post was first published 23 May 2014. To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com. Today is not a major feast day in the Church's liturgical calendar but, as always, there are saints whose feasts are celebrated. One of the more interesting of today's saints is St. Julia of Corsica (also known as St. Julia of Carthage), a martyr who refused to be seduced by personal gain or cowed by the threat of torture and death. My first post about St. Julia, published four years ago today on the blog Principium et Finis, remains one of the most visited pages on that site, a testimony to the timelessness (and the timeliness) of this saint.
St. Julia of Corsica
"St. Julia" by Gabriel Von Max
Julia was a noble maiden who lived in Carthage in the 5th century. When that ancient city was captured and sacked by the Vandals, Julia was enslaved and sold to a Syrian merchant named Eusebius. Despite the hardships and humiliations of her servile state she remained content, even cheerful, because of her piety and her deep love of Christ. These same qualities greatly endeared her to her master.
On one occasion, when Julia was on a journey with her master, he stopped at the island of Corsica where the locals were celebrating a pagan festival. Eusebius joined in the revelry; Julia, needless to say, stayed away. Her refusal to participate greatly annoyed the local governor, who, according to the account in Butler’s Lives of the Saints,
asked who this woman was who dared to insult the gods. Eusebius informed him that she was a Christian, and that all his authority over her was too weak to prevail with her to renounce her religion, but that he found her so diligent and faithful he could not part with her.
Felix, however, was not one to take no for an answer. First, he offered Eusebius four of his own female slaves in exchange for the one Julia; Eusebius emphatically refused to surrender her. Next, after her master had fallen asleep, the governor approached Julia directly, offering to free her if only she would sacrifice to the pagan gods. She answered that she was “as free as she desired to be as long as she was allowed to serve Jesus Christ.” This answer enraged Felix, who had her tortured and crucified.
A few points stand out from the account of St. Julia’s life. First and foremost, her devotion to Christ and her courage in the face of unspeakable suffering is an inspiration to us. Maybe, the next time I’m tempted to “go along with the crowd” simply because I’m afraid of the disapproval or verbal abuse of others, I’ll take some strength from Julia’s fortitude in the face of much, much worse persecution.
Julia also shows us the power of example. Clearly, her character and virtue made a large impression on her master Eusebius. While her diligence and fidelity alone were not enough to win him over to the faith, at least not right away, they did give him the courage to stand up to the governor Felix, and convince him not to give her up for, literally, any price. None of the accounts I have seen, unfortunately, tell us anything about what eventually happened to Eusebius. One wonders whether the example of her heroic martyrdom was finally enough to make him a Christian. We do know that the witness of the martyrs was crucial to the conversion of very many people, for which reason Tertullian said: "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church."
A Saint for Our Time
Julia's story also tells us something about the nature of sin. I am reminded yet again of Father Richard John Neuhaus’ aphorism: “When orthodoxy becomes optional, sooner or later it will become proscribed”. What he meant was that simply by doing the right thing one is seen as a rebuke to those who are not doing right. Look at Julia: she wasn’t interfering with the pagan festival, she was simply staying away. The governor, however, couldn’t tolerate anyone who was not actively endorsing his activities. How often we have seen this same attitude today. Granted, at least in the United States, nobody is literally being crucified, although the advocates of a “New Orthodoxy” will certainly try to destroy the reputation and livelihood of anyone who does not publicly cheer for their innovations.
The Benham Brothers
A recent example (among many) is that of the Benham Brothers, whose planned home improvement program on the HGTV network was cancelled [see here] because the brothers, who are evangelical Christians, publicly oppose abortion and gay marriage. It appears that the activists who intimidated HGTV also successfully pressured the bank with whom the Benhams have worked for years to sever ties – at least until the counter-reaction from Christians and others concerned with the erosion of personal freedom caused them to reconsider. The bank now claims that the whole thing was simply a misunderstanding [here].
But sin's not the end of the story, either. We have seen throughout the history of the Church the truth of the aphorism, "The bigger they come, the harder they fall"; zealous persecutors from St. Paul himself to the Nazi death-camp guards who were awed by the martyrdom of St. Maximilian Kolbe have been converted, often by witnessing the faith and Christ-like serenity of their victims. The ancient accounts don't tell us, but the governor Felix might well have been one of these. Whether or not he himself was moved in this way, we can be sure that many of the other pagan witnesses were.
Finally, the example of St. Julia of Corsica has continued to inspire people through the centuries and is still with us to this day as a reminder that, although there there will always be defeats along the way, Christ wins in the end. If we can put our faith in that, as Julia did, we can persevere. As St. Peter said: " Rejoice in so far as you share Christ's sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed" (1 Peter 13).
The Throwback below was first published 17 August 2015 Here is a sign of things to come, or more accurately, a present reality that is becoming all too common:
A British woman with no serious health issues ended her life July 21 at a suicide clinic because, she said, she didn't want to grow old. Gill Pharaoh, 75, said her work in a nursing home revealed the "awful" truth of old age and burdens placed on loved ones and caregivers, the Telegraph reports by way of the Sunday Times.
Gill Pharaoh, in a photo from her blog
Let me emphasize at the outset that I don’t wish to ridicule Pharaoh: I pray that she can find God’s mercy in the hereafter. She provides us with a concrete example, however, of how today’s conventional wisdom promotes death as the solution to our problems. The appeal to relieve the “burdens placed on loved ones and caregivers”, for instance, is one of the primary emotional appeals that euthanasia advocates use (and both euthanasia and abortion promoters rely heavily on an appeal to emotion). Pharaoh herself, who wrote extensively about her decision before she killed herself, dismissed the idea that she should expect the support of her children in her old age, saying: "I had children for the personal and selfish reason that I wanted them for the pleasure and joy they bring. I want them to enjoy their middle years without having to worry about me."
This is a sad and confused argument. Again, I don’t doubt Pharaoh’s sincerity, but I can’t believe that she was as selfish as she claims. Surely she changed diapers, cleaned up vomit, awakened from much-needed sleep to feed or comfort crying babies, none of which is very joyful or pleasurable, and that didn’t deter from giving birth again. Did she really think of her children as merely a “burden”? Of course not. I’m sure she thought the “joy and pleasure” well worth the “burden” and, yes, the “worry” of caring for her children from birth to adulthood. By even the crassest calculus, isn’t it reasonable to expect her children to return the favor when she needs them to do the same for her?
Needless to say, we shouldn’t limit ourselves to the crassest calculus. I’m sure Gill Pharaoh endured the discomforts and inconveniences of child-rearing for the same reason that any of us who are parents do: because we love our children, not because of some loss/benefit ratio. We see the trouble we endure for their sake as a way of expressing our love, of making it real; that’s why, despite all the trouble they cause us, our children bring us joy and pleasure. Ironically, what she has done now is really much more selfish: she has deprived them of the opportunity to love her in the same way. Even worse, by citing their convenience as a primary reason for her premature death, she is placing responsibility for her decision on them.
And, of course, there is more to the ‘"awful" truth of old age’ to which she refers than the purported inconvenience to loved ones:
she recounted a life slowly sapped of former joys like long walks and gardening sessions. "Not to mention the hundred and one other minor irritations like being unable to stand for long, carry a heavy shopping bag, run for a bus, remember the names of books I have read, or am reading, or their authors."
A few decades ago, when we as a society still recoiled at the thought of intentionally ending any innocent person’s life, euthanasia advocates relied on searing anecdotes about terminally ill people undergoing excruciating suffering, or about people such as Karen Ann Quinlan who were kept alive only by machines, and who seemed to have no hope of ever regaining consciousness. More recently we have reached the point where few of us seem to find it remarkable that we commonly starve to death people who aren’t even dying or unconscious, but are merely extremely old or disabled. And so now, apparently, we are expected to accept that simply slowing down, or having to put up with “minor irritations”, is reason enough for otherwise healthy people to take their own lives.
The aged St. John Paul II
There’s no reason to think that it will end here. We live in a culture that has increasingly rejected the belief in the sacredness of anything, including human life. Public schools (and many private, even religiously affiliated, ones) reinforce this worldview in a variety ways, and it is communicated by popular culture in countless messages both subtle and overt. It follows that if all we really are is protoplasm, or a particularly complex assemblage of molecules, what could possibly be sacrosanct? If the materialist view is correct, then there cannot be any sort of “meaning” to anything; human life itself is meaningless and suffering, which (in this view) is nothing but pointless pain and distress, is worse than useless: why not just put an end to it all? In such a world suicide clinics can only multiply. Is it any wonder that St. John Paul the Great spoke of a “Culture of Death”?
In response to this Gospel of Despair we Christians can point to the Mystery of the Cross. Christ showed us in his own agonizing, distressing death that suffering even to the end can be not just meaningful, but redemptive: through our suffering we, too, can accomplish great good. We have seen the lesson of Christ’s redemptive suffering reflected in the lives of countless of his followers, from the first martyrs to St. John Paul himself, who taught a worldwide audience that “death with dignity” does not mean taking it upon ourselves to cut off the concluding chapters of our lives.
Many of us know family and friends who have likewise embraced the Way of the Cross. In my case I’m thinking in particular of an aunt whose faith-filled serenity during a slow and difficult death from cancer had a profound impact on everyone who saw her in her final days. I couldn’t help but think of this aunt when I read that Gill Pharaoh had said: "I do not want people to remember me as a sort of old lady hobbling up the road with a trolley". My aunt’s loved ones don’t picture her infirmity when they remember her: they talk about her, how she exuded love and joy despite her suffering, an image of beauty in the midst of the ugliness of her fatal illness. They don’t remember her depleted body, they remember her.
Again, my purpose isn’t to criticize Gill Pharaoh. She, along with the 611 of her fellow British citizens who ended their lives in Swiss suicide “clinics” between 2008-2012, and an ever lengthening list of others throughout the Western World, is a victim of a Godless, and therefore anti-human, worldview, a philosophy that tells us our “dignity” somehow lies in escape from what we are. The Truth is very different. St. Irenaeus said that “The Glory of God is Man fully alive.” Suffering is a part of every human life: we can’t escape from it without denying our humanity.
Over the past two millenia the Church has seen an endless flood of inspiring Saints. Most of these heroes of The Faith are not officially recognized, but thousands of them are commemorated with a feast day (in most cases, the date of the saint’s death, which is to say the anniversary of when he or she joined God in Heaven). The major commemoration today, of course, is the feast day of St. Anthony of Padua [here], one of the great Saints and a Doctor of the Church. But it is also the feast of St. Augustine of Huy, one of the Vietnamese Martyrs, of whom most of us westerners know far too little (the bio of the saint here). Catholic.org tells us that somewhere between 130,000 and 300,000 Catholics have been martyred in Vietnam over the past two centuries, both under the imperial government of the nineteenth century and the more recent communist regime, and often by horrific means; St. Augustine of Huy was literally sawed into pieces while still alive. There are also saints about whom little more than the name has survived, such as the Irish St. Damhnade and the African Saints Fortunatus and Lucian.
One of the lesser-known saints commemorated today is St. Peregrinus [bio here], whose actual name was Cetteus. We are warned that his biography is largely unverifiable, but it seems believable enough. He was bishop of the Italian city of Amiternum in the 6th century. There was a feud between two of the invading Lombards, one of whom was threatened with death. The bishop successfully pleaded to save his life, for which reason the other, assuming the bishop was simply taking his rival's side, had him thrown into a river with a large stone tied around his neck. Cetteus was called "Peregrinus" (which means "pilgrim" or "traveler") by the fishermen who discovered his body, who knew he was a bishop by his vestments, but did not know his name.
Several things stand out from the story of St. Peregrinus. One, of course, is that Christ's followers would "be hated by all" (Matthew 10:22), even for doing nothing more than trying to spread peace. We don't need to look back to the early centuries of the Church to see the truth in that. We also see, in the Lombard chieftain whose imagination could not conceive of any motives higher than his own ambitions, the truth of St. Paul's assertion that "The wisdom of this world is folly with God" (1 Corinthians 3:19). The Saint's adopted name also reminds that, as St. Paul tells us (Phil. 3:20), our true citizenship is not here, but in heaven. St. Augustine adds that "We are but travelers [peregrini] on a journey without yet a fixed abode . . ."
Peregrini is sometimes translated as "pilgrims", because we are travelers on our way to a Holy Place (in our case, we hope, the Holiest of Places). Let us ask St. Peregrinus to pray for us on our earthly journey, so that we might enjoy with him eternity in the Presence of Our Lord.
Martyr of England. She was born Margaret Plantagenet, the niece of Edward IV and Richard III. She married Sir Reginald Pole about 1491 and bore five sons, including Reginald Cardinal Pole. Margaret was widowed, named countess of Salisbury, and appointed governess to Princess Mary, daughter of Henry VIII and Queen Catherine of Aragon, Spain. She opposed Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, and the king exiled her from court, although he called her “the holiest woman in England.” When her son, Cardinal Pole, denied Henry’s Act of Supremacy, the king imprisoned Margaret in the Tower of London for two years and then beheaded her on May 28. In 1538, her other two sons were executed. She was never given a legal trial. She was seventy when she was martyred. Margaret was beatified in 1886. (from Butler's Lives of the Saints)
I called my recent piece on St. Julia of Corsica “A Saint For Our Times”; when I think about it, I have yet to find a Saint who isn’t for our times. But today’s Saint, Blessed Margaret Pole, who gave her life in defense of the sanctity of marriage, seems especially suited to the situation of our increasingly post-Christian culture. The niece of two kings, Blessed Margaret was martyred because she refused to applaud publicly the sacrifice of Holy Matrimony to a third king’s lust.
Henry VIII
Blessed Margaret’s antagonist, Henry VIII, could serve as a sort of patron “anti-saint” for our times. He was a man possessed of great gifts: he was given a strong, handsome, athletic body, a quick mind that he applied to writing and musical composition as well as to governing, and was entrusted with the rule of a rich and powerful kingdom. Henry never mastered himself, however, and so his prodigious talents were put at the service, not of his people, but of his equally prodigious cravings for women, wealth, and power. In the end he tried to swallow even the Church. In his later years his grossly obese body became a living image of his insatiable appetites.
People come and go, but human nature doesn’t change. King Henry is long gone, but his imitators are still with us. Like Henry, they are not satisfied with mere tolerance or tacit assent: they require full-throated public approval, and so the Margaret Poles must be silenced. Nobody is literally being led to the block, thankfully, and pray God it never comes to that. Nevertheless, as we have seen over and over again, those who stand up for Church, family, and traditional moral norms today, even if they do so privately, can expect to have their character blackened and their livelihoods threatened.
I have often heard Blessed Margaret’s younger and much better known contemporary, St. Thomas More, proposed as a Patron Saint for our times because of his martyrdom in defense of the Church and Marriage. Like him, Blessed Margaret's firm reliance on Christ's loving care gave her the strength to stand fast in face of mortal threats, and the serenity not to be swallowed up in bitterness against her persecutors. We would do well to invoke Blessed Margaret Pole along with St. Thomas More, and to pray for her intercession against the ravenous spirit of Henry VIII that yet again threatens both Faith and Family.
Today is not a major feast day in the Church's liturgical calendar but, as always, there are saints whose feasts are celebrated. One of the more interesting of today's saints is St. Julia of Corsica (also known as St. Julia of Carthage). There is an account below taken from Butler's Lives of the Saints, with my commentary afterward:
"St. Julia" by Gabriel von Max
St. Julia of Corsica St. Julia was a noble virgin of Carthage, who, when the city was taken by Genseric in 489 [sic - Carthage was actually captured by Genseric and the Vandals in 439], was sold for a slave to a pagan merchant of Syria named Eusebius. Under the most mortifying employments of her station, by cheerfulness and patience she found a happiness and comfort which the world could not have afforded. All the time she was not employed in her master's business was devoted to prayer and reading books of piety. Her master, who was charmed with her fidelity and other virtues, carried her with him on one of his voyages to Gaul. Having reached the northern part of Corsica, he cast anchor, and went on shore to join the pagans of the place in an idolatrous festival. Julia was left at some distance, because she would not be defiled by the superstitious ceremonies which she openly reviled. Felix, the governor of the island, who was a bigoted pagan, asked who this woman was who dared to insult the gods. Eusebius informed him that she was a Christian, and that all his authority over her was too weak to prevail with her to renounce her religion, but that he found her so diligent and faithful he could not part with her. The governor offered him four of his best female slaves in exchange for her. But the merchant replied, "No; all you are worth will not purchase her; for I would freely lose the most valuable thing I have in the world rather than be deprived of her." However, the governor, while Eusebius was drunk and asleep, took upon him to compel her to sacrifice to his gods. He offered to procure her liberty if she would comply. The Saint made answer that she was as free as she desired to be as long as she was allowed to serve Jesus Christ. Felix, thinking himself derided by her undaunted and resolute air, in a transport of rage caused her to be struck on the face, and the hair of head to be torn off, and lastly, ordered her to be hanged on a cross till she expired. Certain monks of the isle of Gorgon carried off her body; but in 768 Desiderius, King Of Lombardy, removed her relics to Brescia, where her memory is celebrated with great devotion.
A few points stand out from the account of St. Julia’s life. First and foremost, her devotion to Christ and her courage in the face of unspeakable suffering is an inspiration to us. Maybe, the next time I’m tempted to “go along with the crowd” simply because I’m afraid of the disapproval or verbal abuse of others, I’ll take some strength from Julia’s fortitude in the face of much, much worse persecution.
Julia also shows us the power of example. Clearly, her character and virtue made a large impression on her master Eusebius. While her diligence and fidelity alone were not enough to win him over to the faith, at least not right away, they did give him the courage to stand up to the governor Felix, and convince him not to give her up for, literally, any price. None of the accounts I have seen, unfortunately, tell us anything about what eventually happened to Eusebius. One wonders whether the example of her heroic martyrdom was finally enough to make him a Christian. We do know that the witness of the martyrs was crucial to the conversion of very many people, for which reason Tertullian said: "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church."
The Benham Brothers
Julia's story also tells us something about the nature of sin. I am reminded yet again of Father Richard John Neuhaus’ aphorism: “When orthodoxy becomes optional, sooner or later it will become proscribed”. What he meant was that simply by doing the right thing one is seen as a rebuke to those who are not doing right. Look at Julia: she wasn’t interfering with the pagan festival, she was simply staying away. The governor, however, couldn’t tolerate anyone who was not actively endorsing his activities. How often we have seen this same attitude today. Granted, at least in the United States, nobody is literally being crucified, although the advocates of a “New Orthodoxy” will certainly try to destroy the reputation and livelihood of anyone who does not publicly cheer for their innovations. A recent example is that of the Benham Brothers, whose planned home improvement program on the HGTV network was cancelled [see here] because the brothers, who are evangelical Christians, publicly oppose abortion and gay marriage. It appears that the activists who intimidated HGTV also successfully pressured the bank with whom the Benhams have worked for years to sever ties – at least until the counter-reaction from Christians and others concerned with the erosion of personal freedom caused them to reconsider. The bank now claims that the whole thing was simply a misunderstanding [here].
But sin's not the end of the story, either. We have seen throughout the history of the Church the truth of the aphorism, "The bigger they come, the harder they fall"; zealous persecutors from St. Paul himself to the Nazi death-camp guards who were awed by the martyrdom of St. Maximilian Kolbe have been converted, often by witnessing the faith and Christ-like serenity of their victims. The ancient accounts don't tell us, but the governor Felix might well have been one of these. Whether or not he himself was moved in this way, we can be sure that many of the other pagan witnesses were.
Finally, the example of St. Julia of Corsica has continued to inspire people through the centuries and is still with us to this day as a reminder that, although there there will always be defeats along the way, Christ wins in the end. If we can put our faith in that, as Julia did, we can persevere. As St. Peter said: " Rejoice in so far as you share Christ's sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed" (1 Peter 13).
