『Catholic Saints & Feasts』のカバーアート

Catholic Saints & Feasts

Catholic Saints & Feasts

著者： Fr. Michael Black
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概要

 "Catholic Saints & Feasts" offers a dramatic reflection on each saint and feast day of the General Calendar of the Catholic Church. The reflections are taken from the four volume book series: "Saints & Feasts of the Catholic Calendar," written by Fr. Michael Black.

These reflections profile the theological bone breakers, the verbal flame throwers, the ocean crossers, the heart-melters, and the sweet-chanting virgin-martyrs who populate the liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church.Copyright Fr. Michael Black キリスト教 スピリチュアリティ 聖職・福音主義
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  • February 8: Saint Josephine Bakhita, Virgin

    February 8: Saint Josephine Bakhita, Virgin
    2025/02/08
    February 8: Saint Josephine Bakhita, Virgin
    1869–1947
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White (Violet on Lenten Weekday)
    Patron Saint of Sudan and human-trafficking survivors

    Out of Africa comes a slave, to freely serve the Master of all

    Black-on-black or Arab-on-black slavery normally preceded and made possible the white-on-black slavery practiced by the colonial powers. These powers—England, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy—were not slave societies, but their colonies were. The complex, pancultural reality of the slave trade and of slavery itself was on full display in the dramatic early life of today’s saint.

    The future Josephine was born in Western Sudan, centuries after the Church and most Catholic nations had long since outlawed slavery. Enforcing such teachings and laws was infinitely more difficult, however, than promulgating them. And so it happened that a little African girl was kidnapped by Arab slave traders, forced to walk six hundred miles barefoot, and was then sold and resold over a twelve-year period. She was forcibly converted from her native religion to Islam, was cruelly treated by one master after another, was whipped, tattooed, and scarred. After experiencing all the humiliations inherent to captivity, she was bought by an Italian diplomat. She had been too young, and it had been too long, so she did not even know her own name when the diplomat bought her, and she had unclear recollections of where her family would be. She, essentially, had no people. The slave traders had given her the Arabic name Bakhita, “The Fortunate,” and the name stuck.

    Living with limited freedom as a maid with her new family, Bakhita first learned what it meant to be treated like a child of God. No chains, no lashes, no threats, no hunger. She was surrounded by the love and warmth of normal family life. When her new family was returning to Italy, she asked to accompany them, thus beginning the long second half of her life’s story. Bakhita eventually settled with a different family near Venice and became the nanny for their daughter. When the parents had to tend to overseas business, Bakhita and the daughter were put in the care of local nuns. Bakhita was so edified by the sisters’ prayer and charity that when her family returned to take her home, she refused to leave the convent, a decision reaffirmed by an Italian court which determined she had never legally been a slave in the first place. Bakhita was now absolutely free. “Freedom from” exists to make “freedom for” possible, and once free from obligations to her family, Bakhita chose to be free for service to God and her religious order. She freely chose poverty, chastity, and obedience. She freely chose not to be free. That is the opposite of slavery.

    Bakhita took the name Josephine and was baptized, confirmed, and received First Holy Communion on the very same day from the Cardinal Patriarch of Venice, Giuseppe Sarto, the future Pope Saint Pius X. The same future saint received her religious vows a few years later. Saints know saints. The trajectory of Sister Josephine’s life was now settled. She would remain a nun until her death. Throughout her life, Sister Josephine would often kiss the baptismal font, grateful that in its holy water she became a child of God. Her duties were humble—cooking, sewing, and greeting visitors. For a few years she travelled to other communities of her Order to share her remarkable story and to prepare younger sisters for service in Africa. One nun commented that “her mind was always on God, but her heart in Africa.” Her humility, joy, and sweetness were infectious, and she became well known for her closeness to God. After heroically enduring a painful illness, she died with the words “Our Lady, Our Lady” on her lips. Her process began in 1959, and she was canonized by Pope Saint John Paul II in 2000.

    Saint Josephine, you lost your freedom when young and gave it away when an adult, showing that freedom is not the goal but the pathway to serving the Master of all. From your place in heaven, give hope to those enduring the indignity of slavery and to those bound tightly by other chains.
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    6 分
  • February 8: Saint Jerome Emiliani, Priest

    February 8: Saint Jerome Emiliani, Priest
    2025/02/07
    February 8: Saint Jerome Emiliani, Priest
    1481–1537
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White (Violet on Lenten Weekday)
    Patron Saint of orphans and abandoned children

    He was forever grateful after a near-death experience

    In the year 1202, a wealthy young Italian man joined the cavalry of his town’s militia. The inexperienced soldiers went into battle against a neighboring town’s larger force and were obliterated. Most of the retreating soldiers were run through with lances and left for dead in the mud. But at least one was spared. He was an aristocrat wearing fine clothes and new, expensive armor. He was worth taking hostage for ransom. The captive suffered in a dark, miserable prison for a full year before his father made the payment for his release. He returned to his hometown a changed man. That town was Assisi. That man was Francis.

    Today’s saint, Jerome Emiliani, endured much the same. He was a soldier in the city state of Venice and was appointed the commander of a fortress. In a battle against a league of city-states, the fortress fell and Jerome was imprisoned. A heavy chain was wrapped around his neck, hands, and feet, and fastened to a huge chunk of marble in an underground prison. Jerome was forgotten, alone, and treated like an animal in the gloom of a dungeon. This was the pivot point. He repented of his godless life. He prayed. He dedicated himself to the Madonna. And then, somehow, he escaped, chains in hand, and fled to a nearby city. He walked through the doors of the local church and headed to the front to fulfill a fresh vow. He slowly approached a much-venerated Virgin and placed his chains on the altar before her. He knelt, bowed his head, and prayed. His life was about to begin again.

    Some pivot points can turn a life’s straight line into a right angle. Other lives change slowly, bending like an arc over a long span of years. The deprivations endured by Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Jerome Emiliani occurred suddenly. These men were healthy, had money, and were supported by family and friends. Then, shockingly, they were naked, alone, and chained. Saint Jerome could have despaired in his imprisonment. Many people do. He could have rejected God, understood his sufferings as a sign of God’s disfavor, become bitter, and given up. Instead, he persevered. His imprisonment was a purification. He gave his suffering purpose.

    Once free, he was like a man born anew, grateful that the heavy prison chains no longer weighed down his body to the floor. Once he started sprinting away from that prison fortress, it was like Saint Jerome never stopped running. He studied, was ordained a priest, and travelled throughout Northern Italy founding orphanages, hospitals, and homes for abandoned children, fallen women, and outcasts of all kinds. Exercising his priestly ministry in a Europe newly split by Protestant heresies, Jerome also wrote perhaps the first question-and-answer catechism in order to inculcate Catholic doctrine in his charges. Like so many saints, he seemed to be everywhere at once, caring for everyone except himself. While tending to the sick, he became infected and died in 1537, a martyr to generosity. He was, naturally, the kind of man who attracted followers. They eventually formed into a religious Congregation and received ecclesiastical approbation in 1540. Saint Jerome was canonized in 1767 and named the Patron Saint of orphans and abandoned children in 1928.

    Jerome’s life hinged on one pivot. It is a lesson. Emotional, physical, or even psychological suffering, when conquered or controlled, can be a prelude to intense gratitude and generosity. No one walks down the street more free than a former hostage. No one rests more peacefully in a warm, comfortable bed than someone who once slept on the ground. No one gulps a breath of fresh morning air quite like someone who has just heard from the doctor that the cancer is gone. Saint Jerome never lost the wonder and gratitude that flooded his heart at the moment of his liberation. All was new. All was young. The World was his. And he would place all his power and energy in God’s service because he…was…a…survivor.

    Saint Jerome Emiliani, you overcame confinement to live a fruitful life dedicated to God and man. Help all who are confined in any way—physically, financially, emotionally, spiritually, or psychologically—to overcome whatever binds them and to live a life without bitterness.
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    6 分
  • February 6: Saint Paul Miki and Companions, Martyrs

    February 6: Saint Paul Miki and Companions, Martyrs
    2025/02/06
    February 6: Saint Paul Miki and Companions, Martyrs
    St. Paul Miki: c. 1562–1597; Late Sixteenth Century
    Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
    (When Lenten Weekday, Optional Memorial; Violet)
    Patron Saints of Japan

    Native Japanese die to gain the pearl of great price

    The words of the American poet John Greenleaf Whittier capture the pathos of today’s memorial: “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’” The swift rise, and sudden fall, of Catholicism in Japan is one of the great “might-have-beens” in human history. Portuguese and Spanish priests, mostly Jesuits and Franciscans, brought the Catholic religion to the highly cultured island of Japan in the late 1500s with great success. Tens of thousands of people converted, two seminaries were opened, native Japanese were ordained as priests, and Japan ceased to be mission territory, being elevated to a diocese. But the rising arc of missionary success just as quickly curved downward. In waves of persecutions from the 1590s through the 1640s, thousands of Catholics were persecuted, tortured, and executed until the Catholic religion, and indeed any outward expression of Christianity, was totally eradicated.

    Japan almost became a Catholic nation, coming close to joining the Philippines as the only thoroughly Catholic society in Asia. Japan might have done for Asia in the 1600s what Ireland did for Europe in the early Middle Ages. It could have sent scholars, monks, and missionary priests to convert nations far larger than itself, including China. It was not to be.
    Paul Miki was a native Japanese who became a Jesuit. The Jesuits would not accept into their seminary men from India or other nations who they felt were of inferior education. But the Jesuits had immense respect for the Japanese, whose culture was equal to, or even exceeded, that of Western Europe. Paul Miki was among those who, after being educated in the faith, evangelized their own people in their own language. He and others blazed a new pathway forward, allowing the Japanese to not only understand but to see, in flesh and blood, that they could retain the best of their native culture while being faithful to the newfound God of Jesus Christ.

    Paul, a Jesuit brother, and his companions were the first group to suffer mass martyrdom in Japan. A military leader and adviser to the Emperor feared Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the island and ordered the arrest of six Franciscan priests and brothers, three Japanese Jesuits, sixteen other Japanese, and one Korean. The captured had their left ears mutilated and were then forced to march, bloodied, hundreds of miles to Nagasaki. On February 5, 1597, Paul and his companions were bound to crosses on a hill, like Christ, and pierced with lances. An eyewitness described the scene: “Our brother, Paul Miki, saw himself standing in the noblest pulpit he had ever filled. To his “congregation” he began by proclaiming himself a Japanese and a Jesuit... ‘My religion teaches me to pardon my enemies and all who have offended me. I do gladly pardon the Emperor and all who have sought my death. I beg them to seek baptism and be Christians themselves.’ Then he looked at his comrades and began to encourage them in their final struggle...Then, according to Japanese custom, the four executioners began to unsheathe their spears…The executioners killed them one by one. One thrust of the spear, then a second blow. It was over in a short time.”

    The executions did nothing to stop the Church. Persecution only fanned the flames of faith. By 1614 about 300,000 Japanese were Catholics. More intense persecutions followed until Japan’s leaders sealed off their ports and borders from virtually all foreign penetration, a policy that lasted until the nineteenth century. Only in 1854 was Japan forcibly opened to foreign trade and Western visitors. Then, thousands of Japanese Catholics suddenly came out of hiding, mostly near Nagasaki. They bore the names of the Japanese martyrs, spoke some Latin and Portuguese, asked their new guests for statues of Jesus and Mary, and sought to verify if a French priest was legitimate with two questions: 1) Are you celibate?; and 2) Do you come from the Pope in Rome? These hidden Christians also opened their fists to show the priest something else—relics of the martyrs who their remote ancestors had honored centuries before. Their memory had never died.

    Saint Paul Miki, you accepted martyrdom rather than abandon your faith. You chose to serve those closest to you rather than to flee. May we too know, love, and serve God in the heroic fashion that made you so brave and composed in the face of intense suffering.
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    6 分
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