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Catholic Saints & Feasts

Catholic Saints & Feasts

By: Fr. Michael Black
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 "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 Christianity Spirituality
Episodes
  • October 14: Saint Callistus I, Pope and Martyr

    October 14: Saint Callistus I, Pope and Martyr
    Oct 12 2024
    October 14: Saint Callistus I, Pope and Martyr
    c. Late Second Century–222
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
    Patron Saint of cemetery workers

    A slave takes charge of a catacomb and rises to the papacy

    Popes owned slaves for centuries to row their boats, cook their meals, and care for their horses and carriages. Kings, nobles, and middle-class families owned slaves. Slavery was a ubiquitous institution not necessarily rooted in racism, which was a latecomer as a rationale for enslavement. Rather, prisoners of war and criminals of every skin color were enslaved as alternatives to capital punishment. Others were born into slavery from slave mothers, and still others in desperate circumstances sold themselves into slavery in exchange for food, shelter, and security.

    Today’s saint, according to ancient sources, served as a slave in a Roman home for many years and thus was part of that massive social reality of slavery that not even Saint Paul explicitly condemned in his letter to Philemon. Since he was an intelligent and resourceful servant, Callistus’ master put him in charge of his personal bank. But when Callistus lost its deposits, he was blamed and was eventually exiled to the mines of Sardinia. At some point he was released from this hard labor and earned freedom from his slave status.

    Pope Zephyrinus, elected in 199, placed the capable Callistus in charge of the most important underground Christian cemetery in Rome. Under Callistus it eventually grew into a sprawling, thirteen-mile warren of dark, narrow tunnels lined with tombs chiseled out of the soft tufa stone. 500,000 bodies were encased in its walls! Callistus was so successful in managing the cemetery that it came to bear his name, and bears it still—the Catacombs of Saint Callistus. Besides numerous martyrs, it also houses a famous chapel for nine third-century popes. The Catacombs were ground zero for early Christian devotion in Rome. They were not hiding places from persecution but sacred ground on which to kneel beside a martyr’s lifeless body. Saint Jerome himself writes about his regular visits to pray at the martyrs’ tombs in the catacombs a century and a half after Callistus expanded them. There were no Viking funerals, Hindu pyres, or urns on the mantle for these early Christians. They believed in the resurrection of the body, as the Church still does. They knew, instinctively, that it was more fitting to bury a body, to keep watch with the dead, than to casually bake a body like a pie.

    The same Pope Zephyrinus ordained Callistus as a deacon. Deacons have a tighter bond, theologically, with bishops than with priests. Since the Acts of the Apostles, they were ordained specifically to assist the first bishops, the Apostles. The first three centuries of the Church resound with the names of deacons, such as Saints Lawrence and Vincent, who were martyred alongside the popes and bishops they served. Pope Saint Sixtus II was killed, in fact, along with his coterie of deacons after they were all arrested in the Catacombs of Callistus in 258. In approximately 217, Deacon Callistus was elected the Bishop of Rome, crowning his long and arduous path from slavery to a more exalted form of service to the Divine Master as head of the entire Church.

    Pope Callistus encountered resistance over the perennial third-century theological-pastoral issue of how to reintegrate into the Body of Christ Catholics who had been forced to engage in emperor worship. Callistus held that if God could forgive murder and adultery he could forgive idolatry too. No sin was unforgivable. His bitter enemies, including the first antipope, Hippolytus, considered Callistus too lax and committed their calumnies to writing. This damaged Callistus’ reputation into modern times, when scholarship finally called into question the veracity of his enemies’ accounts. Saint Callistus’ life is not richly detailed, but he died in 222, most likely by martyrdom and, ironically, was not buried in his eponymous Catacomb. His original tomb was rediscovered in 1960. His remains had been transferred in the ninth century to Rome’s Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere, which tradition holds was built over, or next to, an earlier church of which Callistus was the patron.

    Saint Callistus, you served an earthly master as a slave and a heavenly master as a deacon and pope. You made Christian burial and praying for the dead a defining feature of the Church of Rome. May we honor you in death just as you honored so well your own forebearers in the faith.
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    7 mins
  • October 11: Saint John XXIII, Pope

    October 11: Saint John XXIII, Pope
    Oct 10 2024
    October 11: Saint John XXIII, Pope
    1881–1963
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
    Patron Saint of papal delegates

    A smart, fatherly priest becomes a warm-hearted pope

    The first Pope John XXIII was an amoral antipope. He was one of three competing popes between 1409–1417, the confusing, final chapter of the Western Schism whose power struggles and political intrigues tore at the fabric of the Church between 1378–1417. When today’s saint was elected Bishop of Rome in 1958, being well versed in church history, he chose the name John XXIII to put to rest forever and always any lingering confusions about the historical status of the first John XXIII.

    Pope Saint John XXIII was born Angelo Roncalli into a large, humble, rural family in a mountainous region of Northern Italy. He entered the local minor seminary at the age of eleven and persevered in his philosophical and theological studies, both locally and in Rome, until his ordination in 1904. Angelo had the good fortune to know, serve, and study under a succession of well-educated, charitable, and holy pastors. Both his formal and informal Church-sponsored education created in him the winning combination of rustic common sense, broad historical vision, and cultural openness that would mark his entire life. His simple, but not simplistic, farm background, stellar education, profound life of prayer, and total immersion in the rich Catholic life and history of his native region formed and molded him into a great man.

    After his ordination, Father Angelo Roncalli became secretary to his bishop, a saintly and pastoral prelate whose total dedication left a deep impression on the young priest who was at his side for everything for almost ten years. Father Roncalli also edited a monthly journal, taught theology and history in the seminary, gave priestly guidance to various groups, and served as an army medic and military chaplain during World War I. His engaging personality and deep wisdom left a deep impression. He was, simply, an outstanding priest. In 1921 the Pope called him to Rome to serve the universal church in various roles, including as the Vatican representative in Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece, and then as the Apostolic Nuncio to Paris near the end of WWII and beyond. In 1953 he was made a Cardinal and the Patriarch of Venice, and thus returned to some of the direct pastoral duties he loved so much and which had been so reduced during his long administrative service to the Church.

    In October 1958 his accumulated knowledge and experience were placed at the service of the universal Church, when at the age of seventy-six he was elected pope. He surprised the world soon afterward by calling for an Ecumenical Council, the meeting of all the world’s bishops that became known as Vatican II. As pope, he published some important social encyclicals, waded into the dawning theological debates of the Council, and then died in 1963, after reigning for only four and a half years.

    From the age of fourteen, John XXIII had kept a spiritual journal he allowed to be posthumously published as Journal of a Soul. It reveals a trusting soul with a deep love of Jesus Christ and the Church, a man aware of all the major currents of culture, and a man of refined spirituality and profound humility. It reveals a saint. Pope John had said that he wanted to be like Pope Saint Pius X—to be born poor and to die poor. In his last will and testament he left $20 to each of the surviving members of his family. It was all he had. John XXIII was canonized on the same day as Pope Saint John Paul II on April 27, 2014. His feast day is not his date of birth, death, or ordination but the date of the opening session of Vatican II in 1962. His largely incorrupt body is visible to the faithful in a glass coffin in Saint Peter’s Basilica.

    Pope Saint John XXIII, may your long life of dedicated and selfless service to the Church and to her faithful be an example for all priests and bishops. May they see in you an example of the Good Shepherd who cares for his flock with wisdom and tenderness.
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    6 mins
  • October 9: Saint Denis, Bishop, and Companions

    October 9: Saint Denis, Bishop, and Companions
    Oct 8 2025
    October 9: Saint Denis, Bishop, and Companions
    Third Century
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
    Patron Saint of Paris

    A missionary bishop is beheaded and the Church’s eldest daughter thrives

    Therapod, Spinosaurus, Ornithopod, Ceratopsid, Triceratops. Creatures with strange names from long ago with three toes, sharp protruding vertebrae, duck heads, three horns and jaws that crushed like the serrated walls of a trash compactor. A cephalophore? A theological neologism for another creature from long ago—a martyr who carries his own head after being decapitated. Today’s saint, Denis, is the most well-known cephalophore. He cradled his own head in his arms as proof of his sacrifice, much like a soldier might point to his battle scars to prove his valor. An early medieval tradition states that Saint Denis, the first Bishop of Paris, after being beheaded, preached a sermon on forgiving his assassins from the mouth of his own severed head while walking seven miles from his execution site to his grave. This legend is, historically, as flimsy as tissue paper, but theologically as solid as granite.

    Saint Denis was a missionary bishop sent to Gaul in the mid-third century, perhaps by the martyr Pope Saint Fabian. By that time, Gaul had been evangelized only in pockets. Blanket conversion of its numerous tribes was destined for a later century, when a unified kingdom imposed a unified faith. Even great movements must have modest beginnings. So the bishop Denis, the priest Rusticus, and the deacon Eleutherius made their way north to a small Roman city called Lutetia, on the banks of the Seine River, where they served both native Romans and the Parisii, the local Gallic tribe. Denis and his companions settled on an island next to Lutetia called, today, Île de la Cité. It is the heart of Paris, the site of Notre Dame Cathedral, and the zero point from which all distances are measured in France. Denis and his companions, embodying the three Holy Orders, were successful enough to provoke the envy of pagan priests who convinced the local governor to imprison and torture them.

    Tradition relates that around 275 A.D., the martyrs were led to a pagan height overlooking Lutetia for their ritual beheading, thus lending the hill its name, Montmartre, or martyrs’ hill. After the sword dropped and Denis’ head separated from his torso, legend relates that he chose his own place of burial by walking, head in his arms, from Montmartre to the present day site of the Basilica for which he is the eponym. This church became the burial place of the kings of France, who strove to surpass each other in devotion to Paris’ patron.

    The form of capital punishment speaks, consciously or unconsciously, to the crime being punished. The heretic is burned, like his books, his flesh melting in the fires which replicate on earth those waiting for him in eternal damnation for having led the faithful astray. Every false clause, sentence, and paragraph of the heretic’s books must float into the air as cinders, never to mislead again. Death by drowning during the Reformation killed those who rejected or taught falsehoods concerning the saving waters of baptism. Hanging, a firing squad, lethal injection, suicide by jumping, the electric chair: all convey subtle meaning via the manner in which they extinguish life.

    Decapitation is the purest form of capital punishment, caput being Latin for “head.” The decapitation of a bishop, in particular, was meant to separate the head of the Church from its body, leaving the ship without its pilot. Saint John the Baptist, Saint Paul, Saint Cyprian, Pope Saint Sixtus II, were all Christian leaders and were all beheaded. The legend of Saint Denis is fanciful but profound. The story captures the meaning of decapitation and responds to it. Bishop Denis’ head is cleaved from his body but still united to it. Christ’s head can never be separated from His body the Church. Christ is one, head and body, and every bishop stands in Christ’s stead to exercise the fullness of Christ’s priestly ministry to teach, govern, and sanctify the people of God. A shepherd always pastors a flock, a pilot always helms a ship, and a bishop is always united to a diocese, even if that diocese is long dormant. The bishop images Christ the head to the earthly members of Christ’s body.

    Saint Denis and companions, you died in the mission fields of the Church’s eldest daughter, France. Your blood spilled long ago so that our blood would not spill today. We thank you for your witness and ask your intercession to make us fearless like you.
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    7 mins
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