『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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 "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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  • November 30: Saint Andrew, Apostle

    November 30: Saint Andrew, Apostle
    2024/11/29
    November 30: Saint Andrew, Apostle
    First Century
    Feast; Liturgical Color: Red
    Patron Saint of Scotland, Greece, fishermen, sailors, and spinsters

    A big-hearted fisherman becomes a daring Apostle

    Andrew was a fisherman from Bethsaida in Northern Israel. He lived on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, which is really a lake, where many of Jesus’ miracles took place. Jesus chose mostly fishermen and small farmers to be His disciples, perhaps because in these professions a man can plan, sweat, and calculate, and still, in the end, fail. Success is not appreciated unless failure is an option. Farmers and fishermen must depend on God’s providence for success. No amount of preparation can make the clouds open and the rains pour down, and no amount of careful planning will make the nets burst with fish. Farmers and fishermen are hard-working, careful, thoughtful, and yet entirely dependent on the weather and other factors outside of their control. They must work, pray and trust in God in equal measure. They must have the discipline of faith. These are the qualities that made Andrew and others such great disciples.

    Andrew was first a disciple of John the Baptist. Andrew was at John’s side when a man whom John had recently baptized walked by. “Look, here is the Lamb of God,” John exclaimed (Jn 1:36). Andrew was curious and, along with a few of John’s other disciples, followed the mysterious man. The next day Andrew breathlessly told his brother Simon “We have found the Messiah” (Jn 1:41) and brought him to Jesus, who renamed Simon as Peter. From that point forward, Andrew became one of Jesus’ most reliable Apostles, a leader among the Twelve whose name recurs time and again in the Gospels. There are various traditions about where Andrew evangelized after the Ascension of the Lord, with most focusing on Greece, Turkey, and north of the Black Sea. There are no certain facts about his manner of death, although various apocrypha state that he was tied to an x-shaped cross and then preached from that high pulpit for days until he died.

    Saint Andrew sat at the table of the Last Supper, felt the hot breath of the Holy Spirit on his cheeks at Pentecost, saw the radiant body of the risen Lord with his own eyes, and endured physical hardships as he carried a new religion into old lands. We can suppose that he, like many of the Apostles, was content with his way of life before he met the Lord. Fishing on the tranquil waters of a lake, sharing daily meals with his extended family, chatting in the evenings with old friends before a fire. The Apostles did not abandon their lives to follow Jesus because their lives were miserable. It was a question of more. More meaning. More truth. More fulfillment. More challenge. More daring. There is nothing wrong with a good life, but there is something better about a great life.

    The Apostles were mostly simple, intelligent, hardworking men whose outstanding characteristics were courage and daring. Many people who could have followed the Lord did not. The rich young man went away sad for he had many possessions. Perhaps the greatest thing that young man had was his youth. Andrew and Peter and John and Simon and all the others were young too. Yet they did not go away sad. They stayed, they followed, they were challenged, and they were contented. Andrew renounced his father, his boat, his nets, and all that was known and comfortable. He traded what was good for what was better. And for that generosity and daring we remember him today, so many centuries later. He was of that generation of pathbreakers who sowed the seeds whose harvests the Christians of today have reaped and enjoyed.

    Saint Andrew, we ask your intercession as an Apostle in heaven to make all Christians more generous in responding to the Lord’s invitation to follow Him. Embolden us to share the faith with our families, as you did with your brother Simon Peter, and to be outspoken in our beliefs.
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    6 分
  • November 28, 2024: Fourth Thursday in November: Thanksgiving Day (U.S.A.)

    November 28, 2024: Fourth Thursday in November: Thanksgiving Day (U.S.A.)
    2024/11/26
    Fourth Thursday in November: Thanksgiving Day (U.S.A.)
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White

    Life is a gift replete with countless gifts

    It’s 1542, and the Spanish Franciscan Juan de Padilla, a rugged ex-soldier, is trekking through the high, waving prairie grasses of the buffalo plains of North America at the head of a small band of explorers. Suddenly, an Indian war party of the Kansas people appears on the low horizon. The Spaniards scatter into the tall grasses for cover. But Father Padilla stays, slowly kneels in the moist soil, bows his head in prayer, and doesn’t move an inch. The war party approaches, and as the Spaniards watch from afar, they stretch their bows and fill Father Padilla’s torso with a volley of arrows. He is the first North American martyr. There are no dissenting Protestants anywhere in sight.
    It’s 1570, and five Spanish Jesuits establish a mission, with chapel and school, to evangelize Indians in the future state of Virginia. In February of 1571, all the Jesuits are hacked to death with the very axes they had given to the Indians for chopping wood. A relief boat arriving a few months later finds Indians on the shore dressed in blood-stained cassocks. The English Potestant settlement of Jamestown is still thirty-six years in the future!

    It’s April 30, 1598, in modern-day New Mexico. A Spanish explorer and a team of Franciscan priests erect a large cross and solemnly consecrate the vast land before them to Christ the King. The local Indians accept baptism and a large banquet is held, and is still held annually, to commemorate the event. The pilgrims who would one day land in Massachusetts are, in 1598, still in Europe. Throughout the American borderlands, in the Southwest, Florida, Georgia, Virginia, and Texas, hundreds of Spanish missionaries in the 1500s were traversing the deserts, swamps, forests, and plains of the future United States of America saying Mass, teaching the faith, and baptizing, long before a single boat loaded with pilgrims ever slowly floated into an East Coast harbor.

    The people of the future United States of America gave thanks in many and varied ways long before President Abraham Lincoln, in 1863, established the last Thursday of November “as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.” North America’s native tribes gave thanks in primitive ways common to all pre-modern societies. They honored the gods who formed the mountains like clay, who blew the winds across the prairies, and who caused the rain to fall. These Indians had their sacred dances, sacred dress, and sacred places where their holy men invoked the spirit gods equated with creation. These robust, but primitive, religious impulses lacked an equivalent moral dimension requiring respect for women, prisoners of war, children, or the unknown other. Christian missionaries brought a fuller, more complex religion which built a solid structure on the native culture’s wide base of nature-based cosmologies.

    When dissenting Protestants disembarked in Massachusetts in 1620, they brought a deep belief in Jesus Christ and in His written word. After numerous settlers perished from disease, hardship, and starvation, they bonded with local Indians to offer thanks to God in 1621 for their tenuous survival. We need not live in desperate and difficult circumstances to fall to our knees in thanks to God for our life and all of its bounty. The intentional disciple must have a permanent attitude of gratitude if she finds it easy to believe when others struggle, if both of her parents were present as she grew up, if the children are healthy, if the job pays well, if the pain in the stomach was nothing at all, if the plane lands safely every time, if the bruised marriage heals, if there is always food at hand, gas in the car, a friend to call, or just one person who wonders where you’ve been the last few hours.

    There’s a million reasons to be thankful and a million ways to express those million reasons. President Lincoln did not explain why he chose a Thursday as Thanksgiving Day, but perhaps the legacy of Catholicism influenced his decision. Jesus Christ instituted the Holy Eucharist, the ultimate act of Thanksgiving, on a Thursday evening—Holy Thursday. For the Catholic who goes to daily Mass, every day is Thanksgiving Day.

    God, creation is not just a forum for action but a gift to mankind, a place for men and women, alone created in Your image and likeness, to work out their salvation, to exercise their gifts, and to render due homage and thanks to You for life itself, the gift of all gifts.
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    6 分
  • November 25: Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Virgin and Martyr

    November 25: Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Virgin and Martyr
    2024/11/25
    November 25: Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Virgin and Martyr
    c. Late third–early fourth centuries
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
    Patron Saint of philosophers, apologists, and all who work with wheels

    An obscure Egyptian wins the double crown of virgin-martyr

    The armies of Alexander the Great swept south and east from Greece three hundred and thirty years before the infant Jesus ever gently swayed in His Mother’s arms. After Alexander conquered Egypt, he founded a new coastal city and crowned it after himself. Alexandria, Constantinople, Caesarea, Antioch, and numerous other foundations gratified the colossal egos of the mighty men who laid deep foundations and raised high walls to commemorate themselves and their patrons. How different from the Christian era and its venerable custom of naming places in honor of the Lord, Mary, and the Saints—San Francisco, Christchurch, El Salvador, Sao Paolo, Asunción, and on and on. Today’s saint—Catherine of Alexandria—appropriates Alexander’s name for Christianity, something beyond the imagining of that Greek pagan of old.

    Saint Catherine of Alexandria was a virgin-martyr from the waning years of the persecuted Church in the early fourth century. Reliable documentation about her life may still lie undiscovered in a dusty codex whose heft is sagging a shelf in a neglected monastic library. Until such authentic corroboration of her life is brought to light, however, the total absence of verifiable facts make Catherine an enigmatic figure. Precisely due to this dearth of biographical information, Catherine’s feast day was removed from the Church’s universal calendar by Pope Saint Paul VI in 1969.

    In 2000, Pope Saint John Paul II went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land to properly commence the third millennium. Among the holy sites he visited was Mount Sinai, Egypt, on whose summit Moses received from God the tablets of the Ten Commandments. The Orthodox Monastery on Mount Sinai is named in honor of Saint Catherine, after a legend which holds that her relics were borne there by angels upon her martyrdom. The Orthodox Abbot of the monastery sadly refused to pray with the Pope during his pastoral visit to St. Catherine’s. Among the unstated reasons for this rebuff may have been the Church’s decision to liturgically suppress Saint Catherine’s feast day in 1969. So, in 2002, Pope Saint John Paul II restored Catherine’s feast day, perhaps as a generous ecumenical gesture to the family of Orthodox Churches.

    Devotion to Saint Catherine began in the late first millennium among the Orthodox. Her cult migrated to the West with the crusading knights when they returned from the Holy Land in the twelfth century. Devotion to Saint Catherine exploded in popularity throughout the High Middle Ages until she was one of the most commonly invoked saints in all of Europe. Even a college at England’s Cambridge University was established in Catherine’s honor in 1473. It is said that Catherine was a beautiful young woman from a noble Alexandrian family who had a miraculous conversion to Christianity, compelling her to make a vow of virginity. Her erudition and persuasive gifts convinced fifty of the Emperor’s most able philosophers of the truth of Christianity. Catherine then had further successful forays in converting the Emperor’s own household and soldiers. When she rejected the Emperor’s romantic entreaties, he sentenced her to be shred to pieces on a spiked wheel. But Catherine’s bindings were miraculously loosened and she survived the ordeal, only to then suffer beheading, thus earning the double crown of both virgin and martyr.

    In the summer of 1425, a young French girl named Joan, standing in her parent’s garden, gazed into the mist closely enveloping her and saw something. It was Saint Michael the Archangel and two women wearing rich crowns. One of these women was Saint Catherine of Alexandria. Catherine spoke sweetly and softly to young Joan, saying that she would be Joan’s counsel, guide, and protector. She even promised to one day lead Joan to paradise. Years later, when Joan acquitted herself well under questioning by theologians, just as Catherine had done when questioned by philosophers, the townspeople said that Joan of Arc was none other than Saint Catherine of Alexandria come down to earth again.

    Saint Catherine of Alexandria, your intelligence and devotion led you to be outspoken for Christ. Intercede on behalf of all Christians, making them fearless in their advocacy for, and defense of, the truths of our faith, even to the point of death.
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    6 分
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