『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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  • January 1: Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God

    January 1: Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God
    2024/12/31
    January 1: Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God
    Solemnity; Holy Day of Obligation (in USA: unless a Saturday or Monday)
    Eighth Day of the Octave of Christmas; Liturgical Color: White

    No one knew Jesus like Mary

    No one falls in love with a nature. We fall in love with a person. A woman loves a man, not mankind. And a mother pinches the pudgy little cheeks of a newborn baby, not the cheeks of a newborn nature. Saint Mary gave birth to a little person, a baby, unlike any other. In that little person, a human nature united with a divine nature at the moment of conception. So Mary was the mother of the person Jesus, and the person Jesus had two natures, one fully human and the other fully divine. Saint Mary was, then, the mother of Jesus’ human nature and of His divine nature. She was both the mother of a man and the mother of God.

    Two false extremes must be identified and rejected here. Jesus was not really and truly only a God who just faked being a man. Nor was He really a man who just pretended to be a God. The Son of God did not wear a fleshy human mask to conceal the radiance of His real divine face. And Jesus the man did not wear His divinity like a cloak that He could remove from His shoulders when He walked in the door. Jesus was fully God and fully man in a mystery of faith we call the hypostatic union. And because a woman is a mother to a person, not just to a nature, Mary is the mother of God. This has been the constant doctrine of the Catholic Church since the Council of Ephesus in 431 A.D.

    Saint Mary has many titles under which we honor her. Today’s Solemnity commemorates the utterly unique, and unrepeatable, bond she shared with Jesus, a bond no other saint can claim. Jesus and Mary probably even looked very much alike, as hers was the only human DNA in His body. What a beautiful thing that our God did not float down from heaven on a golden pillow. How good that He was not forged from a fiery anvil. How right that He did not ride to earth on a thunderbolt. Jesus could not redeem what He did not assume. So it was fitting that He was born like all of us—from a mom. We honor Mary today for her vocation as mother. If she had disappeared from the pages of the Gospels after giving birth to Jesus, she still would have fulfilled her role in salvation history. She was obedient. She was generous. She allowed God to use her, body and soul, to write the first chapter of man’s true story, the story of the Church. Like all true stories, the person comes first. A life is lived, and the book comes later.

    God’s Mother gives us our mother, Holy Mother Church, who washes our souls in the saving waters of baptism, adopting us into God’s family. The Motherhood of Mary gives the world Jesus. Jesus gives us the Church. The Church then brings us into God’s family where Mary is our mother, Jesus our brother, and God our Father. This is the family of the Church. What pride to be members of so noble a family!

    O Mother of God, you birthed the one who created all. How beautiful the mystery. How exalted your vocation that precedes and makes possible the Apostles’ own vocations. At home you bounced on your knee the one who spins the world on His finger. Help us start this new year with wonder more than resolutions, with eternal gratitude more than mundane goals.
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    5 分
  • December 31: Saint Sylvester I, Pope

    December 31: Saint Sylvester I, Pope
    2024/12/30
    December 31: Saint Sylvester I, Pope
    c. Late Third century—335
    Optional Memorial; Seventh Day in the Octave of Christmas;
    Liturgical Color: White
    Patron Saint of the Benedictines

    A new captain pilots the ship of the Church in calmer seas

    One thousand four hundred years before Christ, approximately when Moses led the Jewish people out of Egypt, a pharaoh ordered his slaves to hew an enormous obelisk out of a bank of stone. It was the largest monolithic obelisk ever cut. While it was still recumbent, craftsmen carved hieroglyphs up and down its narrow sides. Then, it was hoisted upright to adorn a temple of Aten, a sub-deity of the Egyptian sun god Ra. And there the giant obelisk stood watch over the endless desert, like a lighthouse, for a thousand years. In the mid-fourth century A.D., a pharaoh of the West, the Roman Emperor Constantius II, wanted the obelisk to grace a new city. So it was dragged out of the sands of remote Egypt and placed on a specially constructed ship. It floated down the Nile, across the Mediterranean, and up the Tiber to Rome. This colossal ancient artifact, the largest of its kind in the world, stands today ramrod straight before the Basilica of St. John Lateran. And the name of today’s saint, Pope Sylvester I, is carved into its base.

    Little is known of Saint Sylvester, though there are legends. He succeeded to the Chair of St. Peter in 314. This was soon after the military triumph of Constantine and his Edict of Milan granting toleration to Christians. Constantine did not make Christianity the official religion of the Empire. This would not occur until 380. But Constantine did give the Church breathing space. The Church could now simply be herself. And so the faithful poured out of the dark confines of their house churches and into the open-aired basilicas. There were processions, statues erected in public, a new Christian calendar, sermons preached in the open, and proud bishops to lead a grateful people. Pope Sylvester led the Church as it grew by leaps and bounds, becoming the primary institution in the Roman Empire, even replacing the imperial government itself. Sylvester must have been a capable and even-handed leader. As pagan Rome slowly transformed into Christian Rome, any number of missteps could have halted the evolutionary process. But Sylvester and his successors stood confidently at the helm, kept a steady hand on the ship’s wheel, and guided the Barque of Peter to harbor with great tact.

    Pope Sylvester did not attend the all-important Council of Nicea in 325, instead sending four legates. Constantine called the Council, kissed the palms of tortured bishops, was present at some of its sessions, and threw a large banquet at its conclusion. The Council was composed almost entirely of bishops and theologians from the East. Saints Hilary, Ambrose, Augustine, and Leo were still to come in the West. Real theology was done in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and Asia Minor. Rome was in decline. Even Constantine himself fled Rome and re-established the imperial capital in Constantinople in 330. Yet…the Bishop of Rome was still the jurisdictional and symbolic head of the body of Christ. All looked to him for approbation if not enlightenment. All turned their heads and craned their necks to listen to what he said. The Bishop of Rome had no equal. It was this role that Sylvester fulfilled. He did not generate theology, but he did validate it and stiffen it with institutional force.

    The inscription at the base of the Lateran obelisk states that it marks the location where Saint Sylvester baptized Constantine. This is now known to be an error. The religiously ambiguous Constantine was baptized in Northwest Turkey just before he died in 337, two years after Sylvester had passed. Saint Sylvester was buried near the Catacombs of Saint Priscilla. His remains were transferred in the eighth century to a church in the heart of Rome named in his honor, San Silvestro in Capite, where his stone cathedra, or papal throne, can still be seen and his remains still venerated. San Silvestro in Capite was built over the rubble of a pagan temple dedicated to the unconquered sun (sol invictus). It was precisely this Roman god whom Constantine abandoned when he accepted Jesus Christ. And it was the sun god of Egypt who was originally honored by the Lateran obelisk. A cross now crowns the obelisk. Rome’s massive Corpus Christi procession begins every year at the Lateran Basilica near the obelisk. No more pharaohs. No more emperors. No more sun gods. A new leader carries God in his hands, and His blessed people follow in solemn procession.

    Saint Sylvester, give to our Holy Father a measure of your steadiness and courage in guiding a people from false to true belief, from darkness to light, and from chains to freedom. Help our Pope to sanctify, shepherd, and govern well in an often hostile atmosphere.
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    7 分
  • December 29: Saint Thomas Becket, Bishop and Martyr

    December 29: Saint Thomas Becket, Bishop and Martyr
    2023/12/28
    December 29: Saint Thomas Becket, Bishop and Martyr
    c. 1119–1170
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical color: Red
    Patron Saint of the clergy

    Murder in the Cathedral!

    Four knights hustled down the nave of England’s Canterbury Cathedral, weighed down with tackle, and found the church’s strong man. Eyes narrowed. Teeth clenched. Hard words were spit back and forth. Tempers. A tussle. Then the four knights brutishly struck down Thomas Becket, his blood defiling the sanctuary. People quickly flooded the Cathedral, but no one touched the dead body, none even dared go near it. The news blew like an ill wind through all of Europe. The December spilling of an Archbishop’s blood in his own Metropolitan Cathedral, a sin joining martyrdom with sacrilege, was perhaps the most stunning deed of the High Middle Ages.

    Our saint referred to himself as “Thomas of London” and said his enemies alone styled him “Becket.” He was not of noble blood and rose in the Church primarily through the patronage of an admiring Archbishop, who dispatched Thomas to Rome several times on sensitive Church-Sate missions. Thomas was appointed Chancellor by English King Henry II, cementing their warm, personal bond. Perhaps hoping friendship had softened Thomas’ resistance to the royal will, the King proposed his friend as Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the English Church. The decision was ratified by the Pope, so Thomas, who had remained a Deacon until that point, was quickly ordained a priest and then consecrated a bishop. But his appointment to high ecclesial office poisoned Thomas’ friendship with Henry II, led to years of exile, and ultimately drove those four determined knights through the doors of Canterbury Cathedral.

    Thomas Becket was a complex man in whose soul formidable virtues swirled as one with powerful vices. He was volatile, easily provoked, and vain. He relished the magnificence of his high status and travelled with a personal retinue of two hundred servants, knights, musicians, and falconers. He fought for England on the battlefield, engaging in hand-to-hand combat while vested in chain mail. But Thomas also fasted, endured severe penances, prayed devoutly, was generous with the poor, and lived a life of purity. Being ordained a bishop helped to cool his temper, abate his pride, and refine his coarser traits.

    England’s two strongest men were destined to clash over their exclusive loyalties to Holy Church and Holy Realm. In 1164 King Henry II demanded significant concessions from England’s bishops: the abolishing of ecclesiastical courts, no appeals to Rome without the King’s approval, and no excommunication of landholders without the Crown’s consent. The King also imposed

    higher taxes on the Church and curtailed priest’s rights. Thomas was aghast at the demands of his former friend and resisted the Crown’s demands at every step. The wick was now lit, and the flame slowly burned its way toward the explosive murder in the Cathedral.

    In reaction to the King’s overreach, Thomas fled to France, met with the Pope, resigned, fretted, was reinstated, and waited. The struggle between State power and Church freedom dragged on for six years as various complex intrigues played themselves out. Thomas finally returned to England on December 1, 1170, to an admixture of hostility and joy. He would not live to the end of the month, and he knew it. In a fit of incandescent rage, King Henry II asked to be rid of Thomas, vague words taken to their most violent extreme by the four killers. When they rushed into the sanctuary, the knights shouted, “Where is Thomas the traitor?” Thomas replied, “Here I am, no traitor, but Archbishop and priest of God.” Thomas’ brains were soon washed over the floor. King Henry II did public penance, the Knights sought forgiveness from the Pope himself, and Becket was rapidly canonized. Saint Thomas Becket’s ornate tomb became a place of pilgrimage for centuries, until it was desecrated by a later King Henry, the eighth of that name, in 1538, when royal spasms once again brought violent blows down on the Church.

    Saint Thomas Becket, your last few heroic minutes on earth made you a saint. Help all bishops, priests, and deacons to emulate your manly virtues in standing strong for the Church in season and out of season, whatever the cost, their whole life long.
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    6 分
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