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  • September 16: Saint Cyprian, Bishop, Martyr

    September 16: Saint Cyprian, Bishop, Martyr
    2024/09/15
    September 16: Saint Cyprian, Bishop, Martyr
    c.200–258
    Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
    Patron Saint of Algeria and North Africa

    The faithful soak up the blood of their beheaded bishop

    The elegantly named Thaschus Caecilius Cyprianus was born in an uncertain year in that buzzing beehive of early Christianity known as Roman North Africa. His biography epitomizes that of many greats of his era: a classically educated Roman citizen of renown finds Christ as an adult, leaves behind his exalted civic status, trades Empire for Church, and places his gifts and reputation at the service of the people as a bishop of consequence. But because he lived in times of hot persecution, Cyprian’s life did not come to a peaceful end like others with similar biographies, such as Saints Hilary, Ambrose, Augustine, or Paulinus of Nola. The mighty Bishop Cyprian was sentenced to death by a local bureaucrat. On the fateful day, he knelt in the burning sand and waited for the heavy Roman sword to lop off his head. Cyprian’s cult of martyrdom sprang up instantly, even as the faithful, carrying white cloths, soaked up the holy blood that dripped from his torso. His name was soon placed in the Roman Canon, where it remains today, spoken from the altar and heard by the faithful at Mass in Eucharistic Prayer I.

    Cyprian was a big-hearted, well-educated “man about town” when, in his mid-forties, he was converted by the example and words of an old priest. He redirected his life, made a vow of chastity that astonished his friends, and even abstained from his greatest pleasure—the works of pagan authors. In all of Cyprian’s Christian writings, there is not one single citation of these pagans whose style and thought Cyprian had so admired. Once converted, Cyprian’s mind focused on Scripture and the growing canon of Christian theology, mostly that of his fellow North African Tertullian. Soon after his baptism, Cyprian was ordained a priest, and in 248, after first resisting the appointment, he was made the bishop of his home city of Carthage. His impressive bearing and refined education earned him deep respect among the faithful. His biographer, a deacon named Pontus, wrote about Cyprian precisely so that the great man would be known for the example of his entire life, not just his last few heroic moments.

    Under the persecution of the Emperor Decius (249–252), which so marked the life of the third-century Church, many Christians lined up at the office of their local Roman official to offer token worship to pagan gods and to receive a libellus, or small sheet, documenting their apostasy. Cyprian lost all his possessions in this persecution but avoided capture by going into hiding. He governed his diocese remotely through letters. He was also compelled to defend his flight against criticism levelled by bishops in both Rome and North Africa that he was avoiding martyrdom. Once the tide of persecution subsided, Cyprian returned to Carthage and was lenient but clear, like his contemporary Pope Cornelius, in reintegrating the lapsi back into the Church once they had performed a suitable penance.

    The roiling debate over how to pastorally respond to the lapsi divided the Church in North Africa, with some priests arguing no forgiveness was possible for idolaters, and others demanding that the lapsi perform onerous penances before they were received again into the fold. Cyprian responded to these divisions by writing a treatise on Church unity, arguing that the Pope’s teaching on this matter must be obeyed: “There is one God, one Christ, and but one episcopal chair, originally founded on Peter, by the Lord’s authority. There cannot be set up another altar or another priesthood.” Cyprian later clashed with Pope Stephen I over the validity of the sacraments performed by priests who had apostatized, a matter resolved after both mens’ death in favor of the Roman position of leniency.

    Cyprian’s fellow North African, Saint Augustine of Hippo, in Book Five of his Confessions, recounts how his mother, Monica, prayed in a shrine dedicated to Saint Cyprian in the port city of Carthage around 375 A.D. So, approximately one hundred and twenty years after Cyprian’s death, his legacy was firmly established, fresh and alive, as it still is today.

    Saint Cyprian, you served the unity of the Church as a bishop, understood the beauty and necessity of the sacraments, and accepted death over apostasy. Inspire all bishops to be magnets, drawing the faithful toward Christ and the Church through their teaching and witness.
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    6 分
  • September 16: Saint Cornelius, Pope, Martyr

    September 16: Saint Cornelius, Pope, Martyr
    2024/09/16
    September 16: Saint Cornelius, Pope, Martyr
    c. Late Second, or Early Third, Century–253
    Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
    Patron Saint of cattle, domestic animals, and earache sufferers

    A Pope reigns for two years, excommunicates a schismatic, and dies in exile

    The twenty-first pope of the Church, Saint Cornelius, succeeded no one. After the death of Pope Saint Fabian, martyred in January 250, persecutions prohibited the clergy of Rome from electing a successor, so the Chair of Saint Peter was vacant for over a year. Finally, when the cruel Emperor Decius departed Rome on military campaign, the clergy chose Cornelius as Bishop of Rome. Not everyone was happy with the choice, especially the former future pope Novatian, who had led the Roman clergy during the vacancy and had convinced himself that he was going to be elected. Novatian’s supporters consecrated him bishop and refused to acknowledge Cornelius. Sides were taken, letters were written, and tensions heightened. After consolidating support from the esteemed Saint Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, and others, Cornelius resolved the dispute by convening a synod of bishops which excommunicated the schismatic Novatian and his followers.

    Pope Cornelius reigned for a little over two years, from March 251 to June 253. Even though his time in office was brief, he made some important decisions and left an interesting legacy. Decius’ persecution gave rise to the greatest pastoral dilemma of the third century—how, and whether, to reintegrate Christians who had offered pagan sacrifice, regretted it, and desired to enter again into the embrace of Mother Church. The related question of whether bishops, priests, and deacons who had apostosized could perform valid sacraments would vex Cornelius’s successors. There were two camps on this issue. Novatian held that lapsed Christians were idolaters, and idolatry was, in the Old Testament especially, unforgivable. The Church could not absolve such apostates. They were to be judged by God alone at death. Cornelius, Saint Cyprian, and other bishops occupied a more moderate position. They taught that the lapsi could be reintegrated into the Church through repentance and an appropriate penance. Cornelius’ position won the day, forever and always, establishing an important theological precedent: There is no sin that cannot be forgiven.

    Pope Cornelius also left, in his letters, an important record of the size, state, and organization of the Church of Rome, hard facts so obvious to those inside of a culture that they often go unreported in historical documents. Decius’ successor as Emperor was named Gallus, and he was no friend of Christians either. He banished Cornelius to a city not far from Rome where the Pope died of physical hardship. Saint Cornelius was buried near the papal crypt in the Catacombs of Saint Callixtus. One day in 1849, an amateur archeologist, a layman who worked in the Vatican library, found a small marble shard that read NELIUS MARTYR in a field on the outskirts of Rome. But there was no martyr named Nelius. He then found another shard that read COR. The inscription is still visible today in the Catacombs of Callixtus: Cornelius Martyr.

    The Romans unsheathed their long knives in the 250s. Pope after pope was martyred by various means. But the Church did not run and hide, it stayed and grew. The blood of Cornelius and other pope-martyrs wet the soil, and the seeds of faith moistened, grew, and sprouted into the vast garden of Catholicism that slowly, and imperceptibly, took deep root in the ground of Europe. Saint Cornelius’ name is read at Mass in Eucharistic Prayer I even today, next to Saint Cyprian’s. He was staunch in his defense of the Church, yet appropriately lenient to his fellow Christians who did not possess his same fortitude. In this respect, he was as wise a pastor as he was brave a martyr.

    Saint Cornelius, our Lord said that it profits a man nothing to gain the whole world if he would lose his own soul. You gained the papacy, not the whole world, yet gave it up rather than bend to the will of the Church’s enemies. Help us to persevere like you.
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    6 分
  • September 15: Our Lady of Sorrows

    September 15: Our Lady of Sorrows
    2024/09/14
    September 15: Our Lady of Sorrows
    Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
    Patroness of Slovakia

    A mother is only as happy as her saddest child

    Every life climbs its Calvary. Every soul has its quiet sorrow which cannot be shared in full with any other soul. This concealed pain is the very real drama that plays out behind the curtain of the duties and distractions of everyday life. Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man, shared in all things human, save sin, including pain and sorrow. So He wept at the death of Lazarus, and He balanced the heavy cross on His sore bones and trudged up a hill to His own execution. Thoughts and ideas can be shared in their totality. Emotions and experiences only partially so. Suffering is intensely private in that it is a personal, lived experience. The intense sufferings of Jesus Christ were intensified by His perfection. It was more unjust, more cruel, that one so perfect should suffer at the hands of creatures of His own making. Only a perfect being similar to Jesus could enter into His sorrow, could experience it somewhat as He did. That person was Mary. She was not a Goddess, of course, but the New Eve, the perfect person God intended that every person should be from the start. Because she was perfect, she most understood, and felt, the pain of her perfect Son. Shared perfection led to shared sorrow.

    Today’s feast commemorates the sorrows of Mary, most especially those lived during Jesus’ passion and death. Devotional images of Mary show her heart pierced by seven swords, symbolic of seven sorrows: the prophecy of Simeon; the flight into Egypt; Jesus being lost in the temple; meeting Jesus on His way to Calvary; standing at the foot of the Cross; being present when Jesus was removed from the Cross; and her presence at His burial. Mary was perfect, but her life wasn’t perfect. She was squeezed by the same wine press of pain, humiliation, and sorrow that squeezes every life. She was unmarried and pregnant and must have heard the neighbors’ whispers as she walked the dusty streets of her town. She and her family had to flee to a far-off land to escape the murderous King Herod the Great. She lived a real life stuffed with real human drama. But her most intense sorrows were felt when she was in her late forties, when her one and only child died a public death, leaving her, already a widow, totally alone, her middle-aged face stretched with sorrow.

    When our fingers and thumb walk up and down the chain of God’s mercy, we ruminate over things glorious, joyful, luminous, and sorrowful. We recall historical events like Christ’s Baptism and the Last Supper, and theological events like the Assumption and the Coronation.

    The Sorrowful Mysteries are historical. Mary hovers just off center stage. She stands nearby, amidst the crowd on the path to Calvary, upright and brave at the foot of the Cross, weeping as her dead boy is wrapped in a sheet and delicately placed on a cold slab in a rock-cut tomb. She is Our Lady of Sorrows because she, and the Church, are mothers. They give and nurture life. They feel more than men. They respond to suffering with co-suffering, not so much through actions and solutions. On today’s feast, we recall Mary’s sorrow and share in it. But our sorrow is not that of a godless Viking, a pagan Roman, or a modern secularist. Christian grief is not godless grief. Our grief, like Mary’s grief, is ameliorated by the sure and certain hope that the last word in our book is not death and despair but hope and life. Mary’s sorrow is temporary, as all of our sorrows one day will be. There is nothing that does not have a context, except for God. And the context for Christian sorrow is the Resurrection.

    Mary of Sorrows, you shared the pain and sorrow of your perfect Son but were never forlorn. Help all who turn to you to unite our sorrows to yours and His so that we may co-suffer in His death and co-share in His Resurrection.
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    6 分
  • September 14: Exaltation of the Holy Cross

    September 14: Exaltation of the Holy Cross
    2024/09/14
    September 14: Exaltation of the Holy Cross
    Feast; Liturgical Color: Red
    Patronal Feast of Cortona, Italy

    A torture device is transformed into a universal symbol of hope and peace

    If the Romans had hung criminals from a gibbet, then Catholic churches would display a noose in their sanctuaries instead of a cross. Or a statue of Jesus’ lifeless body would be hanging in the sanctuary from a sturdy branch with a rope wrapped tightly around His neck. If the Romans had practiced stoning as their chosen form of capital punishment, then there would be a pile of rocks for the congregation to gaze at in hope, with Jesus’ body, bruised and broken, lying lifeless nearby. We are accustomed to the cross. We wear it around our necks, chisel it onto our tombstones, tattoo it onto our arms, and anchor it into rocky mountain peaks. We even top our steeples with the cross and illuminate it at night. The Church has been so spectacularly successful in communicating its truths about suffering and death, about resurrection and life, that we perhaps don’t notice that, over long centuries, a device of torture and death has been reinterpreted as the world’s greatest symbol of life and peace.

    This is the paradox of the cross. Today’s feast commemorates the Cross because in spiritual combat with life, the cross lost. A conqueror might plant the head of his decapitated opponent on a spike, a soldier might return from a far-away war with an enemies’ flag captured in the heat of battle, or an American Indian might tuck the scalps of his poor victims under his saddle. Trophies of war take many forms. The Cross is Christ’s war trophy. The Church exalts the Cross on this liturgical feast because this enemy of life was felled like timber by the Son of God. The Cross was brought low and humbled. It was mocked when Jesus rose from the dead. The Church holds up the Cross to say “Behold what the cross did not do. Behold that life conquers even a cruel and public death.”

    God’s self-emptying started at the incarnation. He humbled himself to walk among us when He restricted Himself to the limitations of His own creatures. God continued to pour Himself out until He climbed onto the wood of the Cross, completing the total self-gift that was His life. Our God is not like a general who sends a subordinate to carry out a dangerous mission, like an absent parent who pays someone else to raise his children, or like a physician who coldly touches his patient’s body and then washes in antiseptic. No, our God is like a surgeon who, before he cuts, points to his side and says to the patient with empathy, “I had the same—see my scars.” Our God points to the wound in His open side and says, “I too was the victim of evil and death.” God bore the Cross and its cruel death so that He could drink from the same bitter cup as man, so that He could enter more fully into the world’s sorrow.

    Death on the Cross was not preordained. God could have freely chosen other ways to redeem the human race—through intelligence, wisdom, charm, money, or education. But then, to participate in His redemption, we would have to study for a PhD, attend etiquette school, get a good job, earn an excellent wage, or receive good grades. Not everyone can do these things. But everyone can die. Death is egalitarian. Everyone does it, eventually. So God did it and “so made the grave a sign of hope that promises resurrection even as it claims our mortal bodies,” as the graveside prayer states. The Cross, then, is everyone’s trophy, raised high with one arm, head cocked to the side. It is in this sense that the Cross is a sign of hope. Because the Cross lost the fight with Christ, death is not the final answer. The Cross says that our God does not answer the question of suffering and death in a partial academic way. He responds in a total human way. He responds with His life. He doesn’t explain; He shares. He responds with empathy by taking up His Cross and inviting us to do the same.

    Jesus Christ, Your three hours on the Cross gave that wicked device a new meaning. Through contemplation of Your sufferings, may we transform all the wickedness and sin in our lives into something valuable. May we convert evil, transform sin, and, like You, go from death to life.
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    6 分
  • September 13: Saint John Chrysostom, Bishop and Doctor

    September 13: Saint John Chrysostom, Bishop and Doctor
    2025/09/13
    September 13: Saint John Chrysostom, Bishop and Doctor
    c. 347–407
    Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
    Patron Saint of preachers and speakers

    A great preacher, writer, and intellectual suffers for the faith

    In the tug and pull of the theological disputes of the fourth and fifth centuries, today’s saint was a seminal figure. Along with other luminaries such as Saints Ambrose, Athanasius, Hilary, Basil and many others, he tunneled deep into Scripture and the existing Christian tradition to carve out what is today known as the deposit of faith. Saint John Chrysostom was from Antioch, that “Metropolis of heresy” in Saint John Henry Newman’s words, where Arianism was bred, incubated, thrived, and died in the period between the Council of Nicea in 325 and the Council of Constantinople in 381.
    John received an excellent education in the liberal arts and was baptized at the age of eighteen, in keeping with the custom of adult baptism common to his era. He joined a rustic group of hermits in the hills outside of his hometown in his mid-twenties. The conditions were so physically and psychologically brutal, though, that he left after seven years. Living always isolated and mortified would not be his path. He was ordained a priest in 386. His bishop recognized his gifts and put him in charge of the physical and pastoral care of the poor of Antioch, a ministry in which he honed his natural gifts as a preacher. He was so skillful in preaching that he was given, a century after his death, the title of chrysostom or “golden mouth.” John’s theological acumen was no less impressive. His sermons and letters display a refined understanding of the intricacies of the Holy Trinity and of the Gospels. His beautiful theological and spiritual reflections are referenced numerous times in the modern Catechism of the Catholic Church.

    In 398 Saint John was consecrated the Archbishop of Constantinople, the New Rome, provoking jealousy among some contemporaries. John did himself no favors by his overaggressive reforms as Archbishop. He bluntly criticized women for wearing make-up, Christians for attending races and games on holy days, the imperial court for its extravagances, and the clergy for their laxity and wealth-seeking. Recriminations soon followed. He was falsely charged with treason and other crimes and was exiled in 402. He was reinstated after an earthquake in Constantinople was interpreted as divine punishment for his banishment. But John was exiled a second time shortly thereafter. Like other saints, his time of exile proved fruitful. He wrote numerous letters, specifically to bishops in the Western Empire, including the pope. But also like other exiled popes and bishops, assertions of support were only as sturdy as the paper on which they were written. Practical help never materialized.

    John died in exile in 407, a victim of cold, rain, a forced march and lack of food. Within a decade after his death, his reputation was restored by the pope, and his remains were transferred for burial in Constantinople. He was recognized as a Father of the Church at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1568.

    Saint John suffered for his zeal. He was exiled by civil power in an age when correct theology was understood as a form of patriotism, and heresy as treason. He crossed the civil powers of his age, did not back down, and paid a severe price for his fidelity. When Crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1204, they stole John’s relics and carried them back to Rome. In 2004 Pope Saint John Paul II authorized the return of some of John’s remains to the seat of the Orthodox Patriarch in Saint George Church in present-day Istanbul, John’s own episcopal city.

    Saint John Chrysostom, the heat of your words burned so hot that you were persecuted for your ardor. Inspire all Christian preachers to light a fire of faith in their congregations, without fear for their own reputations or of recrimination.
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    5 分
  • September 12: The Holy Name of the Blessed Virgin Mary

    September 12: The Holy Name of the Blessed Virgin Mary
    2024/09/11
    September 12: The Holy Name of the Blessed Virgin Mary
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White

    Every name begins a relationship

    A name doesn’t imply that you know everything about someone, but it does make a person “invocable.” To know that there is a “someone” standing before you is not to know too much. When that “someone” has a name, however, he or she is placed in relationship with you, and relationships are what matter most. By means of a name, we go beyond a mere concept, beyond a mere thing. A name includes another in our circle of shared existence. No one wants to be a mere number, or to be just a “Nigerian,” just an “athlete,”or just an “accountant.” Titles and monikers flatten people. They reduce someone to where they came from, what they excel at, their profession, their hair color, their language, and on and on. A name opens a door to the more complex reality that is every human soul.

    The God of Christianity is not a mere concept who “does” but a being who “Is.” He has a name. He is “Abba” or “Father.” He is Jesus Christ. He is the Holy Spirit. It’s hard to imagine truly knowing, or loving, a nameless entity whose identity is its function. We don’t, after all, love “country.” We love Poland, or the Philippines, or Bolivia. And we don’t love “husband” or “wife,” we love the concrete, specific, named person to whom we are married. Our love of God begins in the same way our love of people does—by asking His name.

    Jesus Himself called out “Mary!”in the garden on the morning of His resurrection, and her spoken name elicited a beautiful response: “Rabboni!” In Chapter Three of the Book of Exodus, God calls Moses by name to approach Him in the burning bush. God first states that He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But Moses is not completely satisfied with knowing that God is, or for whom He is. So Moses asks the question everyone asks when they want to deepen a relationship: “What’s your name?” God then pulls the curtains aside and invites Moses into His inner life, into relationship with Him. He reveals something more intimate. He tells Moses His name—“Yahweh” or “I am Who I Am.” God hands over part of Himself to man. He can now be called upon. He is invocable. No one can force you to reveal your name. It’s personal, because to reveal your name is to become vulnerable.

    Today the Church commemorates a name as much as the person who bears it. The holiness of the name of God, which the Second Commandment forbids man to take in vain, is reflected in the holy names of all the saints and holy things and holy places dedicated to Him. The name of the Mother of God, the Holy or Blessed Virgin Mary, should be safe in our mouths. This feast falls during the Octave of the Birthday of the Virgin Mary and was inserted into the Church’s universal calendar just after the triumph of the Christian army over the Turks at the Battle of Vienna in 1683. The feast was suppressed after Vatican II but once again placed in the calendar by Pope Saint John Paul II in 2002.

    Mary’s name evokes tenderness and maternity. All Christians should call upon the blessed name of the Mother of God as the most powerful intercessor before the throne of Her Son in heaven. Her name puts us in relationship with her. She is not far away. She is close to us, as a mother should be, and she wants to be called upon by her children who are so in need of her.

    Saint Mary, may your holy name be always respected and honored, because you are closer to God than we are, because you know Him more intimately than we do, and because we trust that you will be with us now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
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    5 分
  • September 9: Saint Peter Claver, Priest (U.S.A.)

    September 9: Saint Peter Claver, Priest (U.S.A.)
    2025/09/09
    September 9: Saint Peter Claver, Priest (U.S.A.)
    1580–1654
    Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
    Patron Saint of slaves, Colombia, seafarers, and missionaries to Africa

    A builder of the Spanish Bridge, he personified respect for human rights

    It is commonly taught that human rights were born in the Anglo-Saxon Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This thesis holds that non-Catholic, nominally Christian intellectuals, including the founders of the United States, were the first generation of thinkers to philosophically articulate, and legally protect, man’s inherent, universal human rights. And, this train of thought concludes, these steps forward were possible only after the heavy chains of traditional Christianity fell to the ground. In other words, human rights were the obverse of Catholicism. As the shadow of the Church and its archaic teachings receded, the theory goes, the inherent dignity of individual man moved into the light. The problem with this thesis is twofold: first, it ignores one thousand seven hundred years of history; second, most Enlightenment thinkers owned other human beings just like they owned cows, or at least depended on the services of slaves or took advantage of slave women.

    Today’s saint was among numerous Spanish priests, nuns, and lay men and women who built the Spanish Bridge from the Old World to the New. They knew what Jesus taught. They internalized the content of the papal encyclicals condemning the indignity and immorality of slavery. They battled over human rights in royal courts, they risked life and limb confronting their own unscrupulous countrymen in the fields and ports of New Spain, and they sacrificed their personal health to care for slaves. Their intellectual advocacy for, and practical living out of, human rights is the true source of the Western world’s embrace of human rights, not those few Anglo-Saxon intellectuals whose culture raised them to despise a broader tradition of which they were ignorant.

    A converted former slave owner and fellow Spanish priest named Bartolomé de las Casas laid the intellectual groundwork for people like Peter Claver, today’s saint. Claver practiced, in flesh and blood, what Las Casas had taught a few generations before him. Peter Claver lived human rights. He cared for actual persons at great cost to his own health. He did not write books like Las Casas or just give lip service to human dignity like many colonists. He implemented Catholic social teaching for over forty years, universalizing the concept of neighbor to include everyone, because everyone is made in God’s image and likeness. He epitomized the sweet and sacrificial love of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

    Saint Peter Claver was from the region around Barcelona, Spain. He joined the Jesuits and requested to serve in the American missions. Like so many saints, when he left for God, he left for good. He never returned to friends and family in Spain. He was ordained a priest in the port city of Cartagena, Colombia, in 1615, and immediately and from then on dedicated himself to the physical and spiritual care of African slaves. But he didn’t just care for them in the fields or plantations of Colombia. He met every slave ship he possibly could as soon as it dropped anchor in port. Using interpreters, he greeted the traumatized chained men and women with fresh water, ripe fruit, bandages, perfumes, food, medicine, lemons, a broad smile and charitable caresses. When weather prohibited seafaring and he didn’t have to be in port, Peter instructed and baptized whatever slaves were open to it. He baptized more than forty thousand souls.

    It is said that Saint Peter Claver lost his senses of taste and smell due to his long years of breathing obnoxious odors. He called himself the slave of the slaves. He also labored among the Spanish slave traders, attempting to convert them from their evil ways. When visiting his fellow Spaniards, he did not stay with them but in their often rancid slave quarters. This apostle of Cartagena died forgotten, alone, and poor. He was canonized in 1888.

    Saint Peter Claver, you worked among the most traumatized and destitute populations of your time, caring for slaves, because they were made in the image and likeness of God. Help us to understand, protect, and exalt the inherent dignity of every human person, just like you did.
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    6 分
  • September 8: Birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary

    September 8: Birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary
    2025/09/07
    September 8: Birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary
    Late First Century B.C.
    Feast; Liturgical Color: White
    Patroness of silversmiths, potters, and chefs

    The last and greatest figure of the B.C. era causes its end

    The birthdates of great men and women are remembered for posterity. The presidents of the United States are commemorated near the February birthday of George Washington. Many nations celebrate their birthday on the date they gained their independence. The Church celebrates its birthday, so to speak, on the Feast of Pentecost. However, the Church typically commemorates its saints on their date of death, ordination, or other significant milestone. Only Christ Himself, Saint John the Baptist, and the Virgin Mary have feasts commemorating their births, because only they were holy from the start. They were sanctified by God in the womb, not made holy through grace and long trial during their earthly lives.

    Nowhere in Scripture is the place and date of birth of the Virgin Mary recorded. Nor are the names of her parents found in Scripture, although tradition tells us they were Joachim and Anne. It is not until the sixth century that there is certain knowledge of a liturgical commemoration of Mary’s birth. This is not unusual. Mary lived a largely hidden life, and her theological and historical significance remained somewhat veiled until the Council of Ephesus in 431 formally declared her the Mother of God. Since that definition, every aspect of her life has become the source of a rich spiritual and theological heritage.

    The Word of God, for the Catholic, is more than its written form. We are a people of the Word, not a people of the Book. Scripture is just one expression of the Word made flesh, the Word spoken by the Father from all ages. This means that a richer, more layered meaning of the events of the New Testament perpetually unfolds in the Church. The written Word of God in the Bible is limited by the fixed nature of all written words. Once put on paper, they don’t change. The Living Word is something more, and it is the Living Word that the Church teaches, preaches, and lives. Just like a person, the Body of Christ expresses itself through both formal language and through body language. The words of the Catechism, prayers, and Magisterial documents use formal language. But the liturgy, sacraments, music, architecture, pious devotions, processions, etc., are more like body language. They communicate the same written truths as the Catechism and Scripture yet in a different, more corporeal, more lived way.

    The silence of Mary, the hiddenness of so much of her life, is intriguing. It is an invitation to prayer and spiritual reflection. Her silence, and the silence of Scripture on so many events which must have occurred but are not referenced, means that there is, and will always be, more for the Church to reveal about Her greatest truths. It is not just Scripture that is inspired but the Church as well. She pulls from Her storehouse things old and new, polishes them off, and offers them to the faithful in culturally compelling language to deepen the content of faith and the faithful’s response to it.

    But even more than offering old things in new ways, even more than preserving past truths, the Church is a generator of revelation. She is the Living Word in the world of today, the vibrant Magisterium who absorbs the world’s questions and challenges in every age and gives them compelling answers. Tradition for the Church, then, is not just a jewel to be guarded. Tradition is forward-looking, dynamic, and active. And this positive tradition continues to celebrate the birth of the Virgin Mary because it was she, the last great figure of the B.C. era, whose birth itself gave birth to a new world. No Mary, no Christ. Her birth was the start of the future we all now inhabit.

    Saint Mary, we celebrate your holy birth in the land your Son made holy. Your discreet life of prayer and service obscures so much but speaks loudly as well. May our lives be discreet in their goodness, known to God and to those few who have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.
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    5 分