Episodes

  • July 11: Saint Benedict, Abbot

    July 11: Saint Benedict, Abbot
    Jul 10 2024
    July 11: Saint Benedict, Abbot
    c. 480–c. 550
    Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
    Patron Saint of Europe and monks

    His Rule helped create Europe, one monastery at a time

    Before the time of today’s saint, to be a monk meant to wander into the Syrian desert and never come back, to climb a rocky summit in the Sinai and never descend, to sit cross-legged atop a pillar, to fast to emaciation, or to remain wordless as a hermit in a damp cave in Lebanon. Saint Benedict changed all of this. This revolutionary introduced evolutionary change, a new way for monks to be radically committed to Christ. No more would a monk have to perch like a hawk in its eyrie, alone, gazing over the valley below. When Benedict opened his mouth and called the monk out of his desert, down from his mountain, off of his pillar, and out of his cave, monks answered.

    Benedict founded Western monasticism, the communities of monks who pray, eat, work, and socialize together in a common chapel, refectory, field, and workshop. Benedictine monks created Europe out of the vacuum of blackness and disorder which enveloped the land after Roman order disintegrated. So many centuries later, the pioneering path that Benedict cut for Western civilization is difficult to appreciate. What was fresh is now ancient. What was revolutionary is now just the way things are.

    Little is known with certainty of Saint Benedict’s life. No contemporary preserved his essential details, as the great Saint Athanasius did for Saint Anthony of the Desert. Decades after Benedict’s death, Pope Saint Gregory the Great recorded some precious few anecdotes of the great monk’s life, but the lack of hard facts and historical chronology leave room for speculation. What is known for certain is that he held in his hands what the world had to offer for a few short years and then dropped it like a murder weapon. He would live for Christ and Christ alone. He joined a primitive community of consecrated men for several years but departed after some unspecified intrigues to form his own small monasteries. Exercising spiritual and practical fatherhood over his brother monks, he was inspired to write a Rule. Benedict became famous, in time, not due to a wealth of biographical detail but because of his Rule. Saint Benedict is his Rule and his Rule is him.

    The Benedictine Rule came to dominate all of Europe. In a Christian age when monasteries dotted every low valley and high town, when the local abbot was as powerful as the bishop, and when schools and culture were synonymous with monastic learning, these communities almost always lived by the Rule of Saint Benedict. Benedict’s Rule became widespread because it was both deeply spiritual and imminently practical. It demanded uncompromising dedication to work and prayer but held individual and community goods in a careful balance.

    A Benedictine monastery was not just a place for penance or asceticism but a family. It was a finely tuned orchestra with the abbot waving his wand at the front, eliciting from the monks’ individual gifts a common harmony to soothe God and correctly order nature itself. The monastery’s structured routine of chanting the Divine Office, of work, of study, of constructing a community for community’s sake, gave Europe a finely tuned rhythm that drove technology, the arts, and scholarship forward by leaps and bounds over other lands.

    Until the time of Saints Francis and Dominic in the early 1200s, there was only one founder worth noting in the church, and that was Saint Benedict. The immense legacy of the founders of large, powerful, and lasting Orders in the Church is mysterious. Founders influence the Church’s spirituality and theology almost as much as Divine Revelation itself. And Benedict was the founder of all founders. Saint Augustine of Hippo, Benedict’s only serious competition for the greatest saint of the first millennium, also left a widely adopted rule, but it never produced the unified and practical communities which Benedict’s Rule generated. Saint Benedict rests in peace near his twin sister, Saint Scholastica, in a crypt under the historic Monastery of Monte Cassino. The “upper room” of Monte Casino became European culture’s symbolic Acropolis and Temple Mount, the beacon to the town, the lighthouse of Western civilization, and it was Saint Benedict who first lit its lamp.

    Saint Benedict, you were a humble monk whose life remains largely unknown, yet you left a massive legacy. Help each Christian in his home, church, and workplace to labor from the shadows to create light, to be the unseen cause behind
    great effects, and to light lamps that guide others through the darkness.
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    6 mins
  • July 9: Saint Augustine Zhao Rong and Companions, Martyrs

    July 9: Saint Augustine Zhao Rong and Companions, Martyrs
    Jul 7 2024
    July 9: Saint Augustine Zhao Rong and Companions, Martyrs
    1746–1815
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red

    New saints for an ancient land start the Third Millennium

    Today’s feast commemorates one hundred and twenty martyrs, eighty-seven native Chinese and thirty-three Western missionaries, killed in a long trail of blood from 1648 to 1930. This roll call of heroes includes lay women, catechists, seminarians, bishops, priests, a cook, a farmer, a widow, a seventy-nine-year-old man and a child of nine. Some were killed while taking sanctuary inside of a church. A large number died during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, when fanatical Chinese peasants slaughtered thousands of Christian converts and foreign missionaries for no reason other than their faith and their foreignness. Some lives were ended by beheading, quickly; others by neglect in prison, slowly; and many by strangulation, painfully.

    The one saint the Church names on this feast is Saint Augustine Zhao Rong. Like so many other saints, he began his professional life as a soldier. As part of his military duties, Augustine was assigned to escort a French priest in China. The priest’s holy example made such a deep impression on Augustine that he decided to convert to Catholicism. After his baptism, he went for the gold— he entered the seminary and became Father Augustine. His priestly ministry was short lived. Father Augustine was jailed, tortured, and left to die in prison during the reign of an emperor insanely hostile to Christianity and to Chinese priests in particular. Numerous other Chinese and foreigners were swallowed up in the same persecution along with Father Augustine. All refused to apostasize and many were atrociously tortured.

    After some faint contact with Christianity in the first millennium, European missionaries first ventured deep into China in the last decades of the 1500s. These missionaries were chosen for their great erudition, sagacity, and Christian spirit. In contrast, the first boatloads of Spanish missionaries unloaded into Latin America were a mixture of holy, educated men, along with others who were almost ordained pirates, adventurers whose zeal for the house of the Lord was so total that they were oblivious to the sensitive cultural realities they, and the West itself, were encountering for the first time. Mayan and Aztec Codexes’ were burned, finely carved statues were shoved off temple platforms, and palaces were razed to the ground out of an authentic, but misguided, Christian fervor. No such haphazard cultural destruction took place in China. Missionaries to China were finely tuned to the local wavelength. They learned the challenging language, respected local spiritualities, and were exquisitely respectful of the ancient, studious, and complex society that had welcomed them. These sterling missionaries inspired a large number of Chinese converts who remained fully Chinese while, at the same time, becoming fully Catholic. Catholicism enriched and purified all that it meant to be Chinese.

    Yet the missionaries’ success was also the seed of their destruction. Chinese strongmen invariably saw the missionaries as agents of Western colonialism rather than as emissaries of Jesus Christ. No matter how delicately the missionaries inculturated the faith, or how many locals converted, Catholicism was a non-native reality that threatened ancient Chinese patterns of life and thought. And so the persecutions came.

    The Protomartyr of China was Francis Fernández de Capillas, a Dominican priest who was tortured and beheaded in 1648 while praying the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary. Numerous Franciscans, Salesians, Dominicans, and Jesuits were killed in the intermittent waves of persecution. These martyrs’ crime was their faith and energetic evangelical efforts. They were not involved in politics or trade. They were not spies or government agents. They died for the most noble and purest of reasons—their faith. The ancient nation of China had no saints before October 1, 2000, when Pope Saint John Paul II canonized today’s Chinese martyrs. Not one of the canonized was killed under the communists who have ruled China since 1949. Catholics executed by the communists await a future unfurling of their banners in St. Peter’s Square. More Chinese martyrs, some already dead, some still to die, will be canonized in an unknown year by a future pope as the history of redemption reveals its secrets.

    Martyrs of China, you were brave in keeping a tight grip on the pearl of great price. Help all Christians to value their faith in easy times so that when times of persecution come, we may stand upright in the storm.
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    6 mins
  • July 6: Saint Maria Goretti, Virgin and Martyr

    July 6: Saint Maria Goretti, Virgin and Martyr
    Jul 5 2024
    July 6: Saint Maria Goretti, Virgin and Martyr
    1890–1902
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
    Patron Saint of rape victims and teenage girls

    A country girl suffers death for knowing right from wrong

    The family of today’s saint was so poor that they farmed other people’s fields. They lost their own land and became migrant laborers who ate what they grew and harvested, their rough fingers rarely touching a coin or printed money. It was a hardship for the parents to house, feed, clothe, and educate their seven children. And then things got bad. The father died of malaria. The family was now forced to share a modest home with another family, and the mother had to work the fields alongside her children day in and day out. In the midst of all this cruel hardship, tragedy struck.

    Maria typically stayed home to cook, clean, sew, and care for her baby sister. It was while she was alone with the baby at home one day, mending a shirt of Alessandro’s, the teenage boy of the family that shared the house, that Maria was attacked. Alessandro had returned—and he wasn’t looking for his shirt. It was not the first time he had imposed himself on eleven-year-old Maria. And it was not the first time she had refused. She tried to stop him again. She screamed that it was a mortal sin. She yelled that he would go to hell. Alessandro didn’t care. She ran for the door, but it was too late. He stabbed her multiple times in the throat, heart, and lungs.

    Little Maria was brought to the hospital where doctors tried in vain to save her life. Before dying, she revealed to her mother, and to the police, for the first time, that Alessandro had tried to rape her twice before. Since he had threatened her with death if she told anyone, she had kept silent. Before succumbing to her wounds, Maria forgave her attacker and said she wanted Alessandro to one day be with her in paradise. Maria’s last twenty-four hours were dramatic. She explicitly chose death rather than to allow another’s mortal sin. She suffered sexual violence like so many female martyrs of the early Church. And on her deathbed, with her body weakening, she forgave her murderer. This was all extraordinary. This was the stuff of saints.

    Maria Goretti was canonized in 1950 by Pope Pius XII in St. Peter’s Square in Rome. The huge number of the faithful made it impossible to say the Mass inside St. Peter’s Basilica. Maria’s mother and siblings were at the canonization, as was Alessandro. After initially refusing to communicate with anyone about the murder, he opened up to a local bishop who took the time to visit him in jail. Alessandro told the bishop he had a dream in which Maria presented him with lilies, symbols of purity. But the lovely flowers scorched his hands as soon as he touched them. He later asked Maria’s mother, Assunta, forgiveness for his crime. Like her daughter, she forgave him. Alessandro served twenty-seven years of his thirty-year sentence. After being released, he became a lay Franciscan and served as a gardener in a monastery until his death.

    Saint Maria showed uncommon maturity for her age. Her poor, rugged life in the fields, and her father’s early death, made life itself serious very early on. Starving people are not frivolous. Death, suffering, poverty, migration, and loss figured prominently in her life before she ever even attended school. She knew no comfort apart from the closeness of family life and the security of faith. When she chose to give up her life rather than participate in another’s sin, she was not saying goodbye to a beautiful house, creature comforts, or earthly possessions. She had the clothes on her back and sanctifying grace in her soul. Nothing else. That grace was the secret possession she would not trade for life itself. She kept a tight grip on her soul, and God rewarded her tenacity by granting her life in heaven with Him forever.
     
    Saint Maria Goretti, mature beyond your years, inspire all young people to value purity and chastity as God-given gifts. Help them to follow your example in valuing virtue over vice, love of God over love of man, and a rich future in heaven over a poor future on earth.
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    6 mins
  • July 5: Saint Anthony Zaccaria, Priest

    July 5: Saint Anthony Zaccaria, Priest
    Jul 5 2025
    July 5: Saint Anthony Zaccaria, Priest
    1502–1539
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
    Patron Saint of physicians

    The man of the hour for his time and place

    In thirty-nine niches in the nave and transepts of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome are thirty-nine statues of saints who founded religious congregations. Some of these saints are very well known, like Saints Benedict, Ignatius of Loyola, and Teresa of Ávila. Today’s saint is among the lesser-known founders. The statue of Saint Anthony Zaccaria looks down from a second-tier niche, high above the Basilica floor. Saint Anthony’s distance from the faithful in art reflects his relative remoteness from modern life. Not every saint can be a rockstar. The Church preserves the legacy of this holy man on its universal calendar, though, for very solid reasons.

    Saint Anthony was born in Northern Italy just as the powder keg of the Protestant Reformation was about to ignite. He studied medicine and became a practicing physician. But his real love was people’s souls, not their bodies, and he dedicated most of his time to teaching the catechism to the poor. Like so many priestly vocations, others recognized his gifts before he saw them himself. Friends and family encouraged him to study for the Priesthood. Saint Anthony was ordained in 1528 and soon moved to the bustling city of Milan. He became a roving chaplain to nobles and to diverse lay groups committed to charitable works and to invigorating Milanese society with an authentic Catholic spirituality.

    Along with two noblemen, Saint Anthony founded a Congregation of priests whose goal was to “regenerate and revive the love of divine worship and a properly Christian way of life by frequent preaching and faithful ministering of the sacraments.” There is nothing new, creative, or groundbreaking in such goals. But as would be highlighted a few decades after Saint Anthony by Saint Charles Borromeo, the vigorous Archbishop of Milan, Northern Italy in the sixteenth century was in a state of religious decrepitude. Today’s saint and his co-founders needed to found a Congregation to blow life into the dormant coals of people’s faith and to rekindle their love of the Mass and the Holy Eucharist. No one else was carrying out these fundamental evangelical tasks. The secular clergy were moribund, and bishops often did not even reside in their dioceses. Someone had to do something, and thus the “Clerks Regular of Saint Paul Beheaded” was born and formally recognized in 1535.

    The Congregation’s members became more commonly known as the Barnabites after a Church in Milan where they were eventually headquartered or perhaps due to Saint Barnabas’ status as one of Saint Paul’s closest companions. The Barnabites encountered fierce opposition from local clergy who were offended by the imputation that they were derelict in their duties and needed reform. These internecine knife fights were quickly settled in the Barnabites’ favor.

    Saint Anthony popularized the Forty Hours Devotion, where the Blessed Sacrament is exposed over a three-day period corresponding to Christ’s forty hours in the tomb. He encouraged churches to toll their bells on Friday afternoons, and preached indefatigably in the streets on the crucifixion, on the Eucharist, and on the texts of Saint Paul. The age for scholastic theological distinctions as fine as lace had long ended by the early sixteenth century. The one-church world was crumbling and with it the luxury of inter-Catholic speculations of a purely theoretical nature. Dissenting Protestantism was spilling into Northern Italy. What was needed was preaching in the streets, raw fervor, and the core biblical message. Some priests spoke with quiet erudition and convinced the few, others explained the catechism well, but only inside of churches to the scattered faithful in the pews. Saint Anthony’s method was, essentially, to walk into the town square, light his hair on fire, and yell “Watch me burn!” It worked—but not for long. Saint Anthony Zaccaria flamed out at the early age of thirty-seven. He was canonized in 1897, and his remains are venerated today in the crypt of the Barnabite church in Milan. The Congregation he founded is of modest size yet still vigorously serving in the heart of the Church.

    Saint Anthony Zaccaria, inspire us to do the simple things of our faith well, before we attempt to do the complex things less well. Keep us focused on the events of the Gospel as the Church presents them to us through her structure, her Sacraments, and her devotions.
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    6 mins
  • July 4: Saint Elizabeth of Portugal

    July 4: Saint Elizabeth of Portugal
    Jul 5 2025
    July 4: Saint Elizabeth of Portugal
    1271–1336
    (Celebrated July 5 in the U.S.A.)
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
    Patron Saint of widows and victims of adultery

    A widowed queen embraces Sister Poverty

    Beautifully placed in the center of a graceful arch, behind the high altar in the Franciscan convent of Saint Clare in Coimbra, Portugal, is an impressive silver and glass sarcophagus. Circular windows cut into the upper portion of the finely wrought box allow the pilgrim to peer down into its contents. You see rumpled printed cloth. You struggle to discern what else you are looking at. But then...you see…the form of a body, covered by a shroud. It is her. You are looking at a sleeping queen, Saint Elizabeth of Portugal. Only a hand protrudes from under the cloth. It is a right hand. It is visible. It is white. It has refused decay. It is incorrupt. The rest of her body? Only God knows, and maybe the local bishop.

    Today’s saint was also known as Elizabeth of Aragon. She was born into a royal Spanish family with a saint in its bloodline. Saint Elizabeth of Hungary was her great aunt and namesake. In a pious age, the piety of today’s Saint Elizabeth stood out. She loved the Lord and all that it meant to be Catholic. She was wed to the King of Portugal at a tender age, moved to his land, and had a family with him. The holy child Elizabeth became the holy adult Elizabeth. She involved herself in matters of war, state, and politics. But she was more concerned with her own soul, the poor, and the sick.

    Elizabeth had the luxury of leisure due to her wealth and noble status. She could dedicate time to Mass, to prayer, and to her spiritual exercises. Her resources of time and money also allowed her to assist the poor, which she did generously, even to the annoyance of her husband, the King. It is easy to say that money doesn’t matter when you have money. Only people with money, in fact, say that money is not the only thing. Money did not matter to Elizabeth, precisely because she did not lack it. She simply gave it away. And she fortified her financial generosity with her personal example of prayer, fasting, poverty, and holiness, edifying her people. She was not an advocate of social justice, but justice. She did not promote charitable giving, but living charity itself.

    After her husband died and her children were grown, she entered the convent of the Poor Clares, which she herself had founded in Coimbra. She took vows as a Third Order Franciscan, abandoned her royal status, and lived in obscurity with the other sisters. Coimbra had a long attachment to the Franciscans. It is the city where Fernando of Lisbon, an Augustinian, decided to become Anthony, a Franciscan, the future saint whose shrine is in Padua. Saint Elizabeth’s choice to become a lay Franciscan shows just how far and wide the influence of Saint Francis of Assisi was felt, even among the upper classes. The Queen of Portugal gives away her wealth, cares for the poor and the sick, is devoted to the Sacraments, actively promotes peace in her domain and in her family, establishes a female Franciscan convent, and herself becomes a Franciscan, and all within one hundred years of Saint Francis’ death. After Elizabeth had given away all that she had, she gave away herself, and then there was nothing left to give. She was a model Catholic Queen.

    Saint Elizabeth of Portugal, help us to see all wealth, of time or money, as a gift and an opportunity to serve the Lord and our fellow man. You promoted peace in your realm and in your family, in the spirit of Saint Francis. Help us to do the same.
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    5 mins
  • July 4: Independence Day—USA

    July 4: Independence Day—USA
    Jul 3 2025
    July 4: Independence Day—USAOptional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White“...nobis donet en patria.”Father hunger—the primordial longing to impress, to emulate, or just to find dad—moves us more fundamentally than any thirst for mom. Mom’s warm love and constant presence is typically assumed. She is always near. We spend the first nine months of life sheltered inside her sanctuary, a memory of closeness and protection buried deep in our psyche. But dad comes later, a remote creature orbiting around mother and child with a deep voice, sandpaper face, and rugged hands. Knowing him, and loving him, takes some work, and for that reason seems more worth it. The desire for a pater, a father, goes hand in hand with our need for a patria, or fatherland. To be a citizen of the world is not to be a citizen at all. The world is not a country. We don’t want to be born at sea, drifting under a flag, any more than we want to be born into family. We want to be born into a family. We want to master one language, stir upon hearing one hymn, and stand with our civic siblings to honor one flag. We want, and need, to love a patria. Independence Day of the United States of America commemorates the founding events of a country as worthy of admiration and appreciation as any country ever was. The United States merits respect for a thousand compelling reasons, but honoring her also points to the inherent limits of even the healthiest love of fatherland.There are only a few things a man will die for: family, religion, and country being the most obvious. To emigrate to the United States many immigrants have, for centuries now, disrupted family life, bid farewell to well-loved homelands, abandoned historic family farms, and been absent from spouses and children for months and years. Why? Because it was worth it! A country worth dying for is a country worth dying to get into. No country has ever afforded its citizens what America has afforded them. Its success is unequalled. And yet, for all of its flourishing opportunity, robust legal structures, and protection of human rights, the patria of the U.S. is not, and no patria could ever be, Heaven itself. A country provides meaning, but not ultimate meaning.When Americans die they will not be judged by Uncle Sam. An old man with a long white beard wearing a star-spangled waistcoat will not stand before the individual soul. Uncle Sam won’t judge anyone because Uncle Sam doesn’t exist. He is as real as the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, or Lady Liberty. The Statue of Liberty consists of a rigid iron frame draped in thin copper. That’s it. “She” rusts. Meaningful secular holidays invite reflection upon what kind of truth perdures and upon the difference between two close cousins, faith and patriotism. Jesus Christ is not like Uncle Sam. He is not an anthropomorphism, a depiction in human form of a non-human reality. We have statues and paintings of Jesus Christ for the same reason we have statues and paintings of George Washington—because the camera hadn’t been invented yet. If there had been cameras in first-century Palestine, Jesus’ face would be as correctly shown as Abraham Lincoln’s.Our crucifixes don’t symbolize God. They show God. Jesus is not a metaphor. He is not the human representation of ethereal God-like qualities. Jesus thundered with the authority of God, referred to Himself as God, and performed Godly acts, including the ultimate miracle of raising Himself from the dead. Jesus doesn’t represent something else, or someone else, that hides behind a curtain or a mask. Our love of God, then, should run deeper than our love of country because God will, by definition, never end. Mighty Rome ended. Weeds grew, and still grow, in the bustling forum where Julius Caesar was knifed in the back. America’s raw military power, global cultural reach, and thumping economy will not last forever. Countries rise and countries fall, but God and His Church will endure. Geological time uses immense spans of millennia, ages, and eons to capture the reality of glacial movement, tectonic shifts, and continental splitting. We should use similar references of time when describing the vastness of God. A two-thousand-year-old Church is ancient of days in man-time. But in God-time the Church is just a babe rocking in a cradle. Geologically we would understand this. Theologically we should as well. The United States will pass into history in one blink of God’s eyelashes. So we should love more what deserves more love. We should love less what deserves less love. And we should live more fully only for a deathless God who grants endless life in a true homeland that will never cease.God the Father, may our hearts bear a deep love for our earthly fatherland as an extension of our love for You, our Father in Heaven. May our one heart burst with love for all those that deserve our love, most especially our family, our nation, and our Church.
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    7 mins
  • July 3: Saint Thomas the Apostle

    July 3: Saint Thomas the Apostle
    Jul 2 2025
    July 3: Saint Thomas the Apostle
    First Century
    Feast; Liturgical Color: Red
    Patron Saint of doubters and architects

    ‘Perhaps’ - the crack in the unbeliever’s wall of certainty

    All unbelievers have a type of faith. They firmly believe in God’s non-existence and in the weakness, not wisdom, of trusting in a reality greater than oneself. Atheism is a belief system, though its object of faith is obviously not God but other sacrosanct, secular “doctrines.” Yet the unbeliever’s secular faith, just like every believer’s, is continually tempted by doubt. The unbeliever, whether fixated on a friend’s lifeless body in a coffin, dumbstruck while gazing at the vastness of the sea, or just when lying in the dark of night, wonders if he has everything figured out. Although he shows a brave front, the unbeliever secretly doubts. He is not certain. He is threatened. There is always the great “perhaps.” Perhaps, just perhaps…the believer is…right. The atheist is under constant assault from faith, primarily from inside himself. Only when trying to quit religion does he realize, painfully, that the drama of being a man cannot be avoided. He exchanges the uncertainty of belief for the uncertainty of unbelief.

    Today’s saint, known as “Doubting Thomas,” is Christianity’s icon of doubt. He loves, serves, and follows the Lord. Upon hearing of the death of Lazarus, Christ decides to go to Judea, where He had previously come under attack. The Apostles are concerned for Christ’s safety, but Thomas supports Him, saying, “Let us also go, that we may die with him” (Jn 11:16). Thomas is strong and generous. But he is also a man, so he does what men do—he doubts. Christ’s crucifixion was a searing experience for His Apostles, and Thomas doubts that one so cruelly and publicly murdered could be alive. He is told by his co-Apostles that the Lord is risen and has appeared to them. Yet still Thomas doubts. He will only believe if he can place his hands in Christ’s very wounds.

    To satisfy his skepticism, Thomas joins the others and waits patiently on the Sunday after Easter. The risen Lord appears again in the same place. “Peace be with you,” He says to all. And then to Thomas himself, “Put your finger here and see my hands...Do not doubt but believe.” “My Lord and my God!” is all the flabbergasted Thomas can muster in response (Jn 20:24–29). Thomas’ simple declaration of faith—“My Lord and my God!”—is whispered by millions of faithful at the consecration at Mass, words of faith forged from the anvil of doubt.

    Doubt is often the starting point, the context, and the invitation to faith for so many modern doubting Thomases. Yet true doubting leads to true searching. And a true search is not perennially open-ended but risks finding what is sought. Saint Thomas’ doubt, his moment of weakness, served a higher purpose when Thomas found what he was looking for. The Son of God said “...the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls…” (Mt 13:45) and “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground…and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how” (Mk 4:26–27). The kingdom is not the fine pearl. The kingdom is the merchant in search of fine pearls. The kingdom is not the seed. It is the man scattering the seed. The search, the scattering, the effort, the struggle, the journey. These are often the first stages of finding God. Honest, authentic inquiry is god-like. Every legitimate search presupposes, after all, that there is something, or someone, to find.

    Doubt is the plow that opens the furrow where the seed of faith can fall and germinate. Saint Thomas the Apostle is our guide and patron in understanding how doubt sparks faith. Being absent, he heard. Hearing, he doubted. Doubting, he came. Coming, he touched. Touching, he believed. And believing, he served.

    Saint Thomas, help all who struggle with belief in God. Through your example and intercession, assist all those overwhelmed by distractions and doubts to come to a well-informed trust in the Father and Lord of all.
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    6 mins
  • July 1: Saint Junipero Serra, Priest

    July 1: Saint Junipero Serra, Priest
    Jun 30 2025
    July 1: Saint Junipero Serra, Priest 1713–1784Memorial; Liturgical Color: WhitePatron Saint of California and vocations“Always forward!” was his motto and his lifeThe United States of America’s impressive Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., includes the majestic, semicircular Statuary Hall. Each of the fifty states chooses two citizens of historic importance to represent it in the Hall. Statues of one nun and four Catholic priests, two of them saints, grace Statuary Hall, including today’s saint. Junipero Serra was the founder of California. He was the pathbreaking, indestructible priest who trekked California’s mountains, valleys, deserts, and shores to found nine of its eventual twenty-one missions. California’s rugged cattle culture, its luxurious orchards and rolling vineyards, its distinctive Mission architecture, and its blending of Mexican and Native American heritage are the legacy of Father Serra and his Franciscan confreres. The Franciscan city names tell the story: San Francisco, Ventura (Saint Bonaventure), San Luis Obispo, Santa Clara, Our Lady Queen of the Angels (Los Angeles) and on and on. The Franciscans simply made California what it is.Father Junipero Serra was baptized as Michael Joseph on Mallorca, an island in the Mediterranean off the coast of Spain. He grew up dirt poor and devoutly Catholic. He joined the Franciscans as a youth and moved to the large city of Palma de Mallorca, where he took the religious name of Junipero in honor of one of Saint Francis of Assisi’s first followers. After priestly ordination, Father Junipero obtained a doctorate in philosophy and taught Franciscan seminarians. He was destined to lead a successful life as an intelligent, holy, and pious intellectual. But in the Spring of 1749, he felt the Lord calling him to become a missionary to New Spain (Mexico). On the fateful day of his departure from his large Franciscan monastery, he kissed the feet of all his brother Franciscans, from the oldest to the youngest. He then boarded a ship and sailed away from his native island for the first time and the last time. He would never see his family again. Our saint’s life began in earnest in middle age. Long years of intellectual, spiritual, and ascetic preparation steeled his body, mind, and will for the rigors to come.Arriving in the port of Veracruz, Father Serra walked hundreds of miles to Mexico City rather than travel on horseback. Along this first of many treks, he was bitten by either a snake or a spider and developed an open wound that never healed, causing him near constant pain for the rest of his life. Father Serra spent the first several years of his missionary life in a mountainous region of Central Mexico among an indigenous population that had encountered Spaniards, and the Catholic religion, two centuries before. Father Serra wanted a rawer missionary experience. He wanted to meet and convert pagans who knew nothing of Christianity. After years of faithful service as a missionary, church builder, preacher, and teacher in Central Mexico, Father Junipero finally had his chance. The Franciscans were tasked with leading the religious dimension of the first great Spanish expedition into Alta California, the present day American state. If Father Serra had never gone to California, he may still have been a saint, but one known to God alone. It was the challenge of California that made Father Junipero into Saint Junipero.Already in his mid-fifties, Father Serra was the head priest of a large migration of men, women, soldiers, cattle, and provisions whose goal was to establish Spanish Catholic settlements in California. Integral to this cultural and evangelical effort was the founding of California’s missions, the vast farms, cattle ranches, churches, communities, and schools that have left such an enduring mark on California. For the last fifteen years of his life, Saint Junipero was seemingly everywhere in California—walking, confirming, working, building, preaching, fasting, planning, sailing, writing, arguing, founding, and praying. He exhausted his poor, emaciated body. He was recognized by all as the indispensable man. Father Junipero died quietly at the San Carlos Mission in Carmel just as the United States was becoming a country on the other side of the continent. He did for the West Coast what George Washington and better known founders did for the East Coast. He founded a society, in all of its complexity. Decades later, Americans migrated to far-off California, newly incorporated into the federal union, looking for gold, and were surprised to discover a distinctive culture as rugged, layered, and rich as the one they had left behind.California’s foundational events were distinctly Catholic just as the Eastern colonies’ were distinctly Protestant. When ceremoniously inaugurating an early mission, Father Junipero said a High Mass, sang Gregorian chant, processed with an image of the Virgin Mary, and had the Spanish ...
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