『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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  • Georgia Martyrs: Beatification October 31, 2026

    Georgia Martyrs: Beatification October 31, 2026
    2026/10/30
    Georgia Martyrs Beatification: October 31, 2026 St. Francis Would Be Proud Polyandry, or a woman taking multiple husbands, is an obscure marital custom. In the few remote Himalayan villages where it may be practiced, brothers marry the same woman to protect rights to family property. Polygamy, or a man taking multiple wives, has always been, and is still, found globally, typically in higher social strata. Only high-status men of exalted power and wealth can take more than one wife. In a harem culture, more low-status women have access to more high-status men precisely because those men are not monogamous. This sometimes leaves low status men with fewer options for marriage among their own, leading to male-on-male class resentment or to low status men coalescing around a chief or cacique. Men's natural tendency towards polygamy in pagan cultures had to be bucked like a bronco before a tamer Christian culture flourish. And it was Catholic missionaries who did the taming. It was hard won and took centuries, but the teaching of priests and nuns and the witness of Christian couples eventually prevailed. At times, though, the price was paid in warm blood. Today's martyrs, all celibate Franciscan priests and brothers, spilled their blood in the soil of Georgia for marriage, for monogamy. Such sacrifice is a golden thread in the tapestry of the saints. Herod Antipas beheaded St. John the Baptist for criticizing Herod's marriage to Herodias while his first wife was still alive. St. Thomas More was decapitated for, among a related web of issues, refusing to endorse the polygamy of his lusty King. St. Charles Lawanga and Companions were burned alive after refusing the disordered advances of their king, who counted more than a dozen wives. Even Kolbe sacrificed his life for a marriage. An Indian sub-chief named Juanillo plotted the bloody end of today's martyrs. Juanillo is a diminutive of Juan, so he could be called Little John. Juanillo was a baptized convert from the Guale tribe in modern day coastal Georgia. He had a wife but wanted another one. Juanillo was a high-status male in a traditional indigenous culture accepting of polygamy. No shortage of women thirsted to be a wife of a chief. Juanillo could have as many wives as he wanted. And no priest, especially a white European priest, would deny him what nature commanded. The Spanish Conquistador Ponce De Leon christened as "La Isla de Pascua Florida" the modern state of Florida when he and his countrymen first spied it in 1513. They thought it was an island. The name can be translated as "The Island of Easter Flowers," reflecting the ships' arrival during Holy Week. Eventually "La Florida" came to mean virtually the entire southeastern United States, as Spanish, French, and English adventurers pushed deeper into the immense continent of which Florida was just a modest protrusion. The struggle to evangelize the native tribes of Florida throughout the 1500s was one battle after another. Hurricanes roiled the sea. Ships sank. Men drowned. Provisions were lost. The soil was thin. Nothing grew. Colonists starved. Priests were slaughtered by natives to pay long standing debts incurred by colonists' offenses. No miraculous tilma ever appeared to dazzle the neophytes. No demon-topped temples were razed or hulking colonial churches built over them. Florida was nothing like Mexico. The 1500s was a lost century, a long trail of tears, for the Spanish in Florida. In the 1590s, Franciscan friars disembarked on coastal Georgia to once again try to establish missions among the Indigenous tribes of that region, among them the Guale people. The Franciscans did not build cities on a hill. They lived among the people in primitive lodgings, ate what the natives ate, and learned their tongue. They preached, administered the sacraments, and taught the basic Christian message, which conflicted with indigenous customs in some areas. And thus it came to pass that the path of the Indian and the path of Christ crossed. Father Pedro de Corpa insisted that Juanillo, a baptized Catholic, be permanently faithful to his one wife, none other and none else. Fr. Corpa was killed on September 14, 1597 and his severed head placed on a stake. Juanillo and his band of frenzied young men then went on a hunt for more prey. Over the next four days they knifed, decapitated, and slaughtered Fathers Blas Rodríguez, Miguel de Añon, and Francisco de Veráscola, and Brother Antonio de Badajóz in missions along the Georgia coast and its Sea Islands. The Catholic Church has determined that the five Franciscans were murdered in "odium fidei" - “out of hatred for the faith.” They were not killed primarily because they were Spanish or because they were colonists but because of the faith they preached and witnessed to. Today's martyrs did not find the fountain of youth in greater Florida but the fountain of eternal life. Their holy images now rest on our noble altars, where ...
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    8 分
  • October 9: Saint John Henry Newman (England and Wales)

    October 9: Saint John Henry Newman (England and Wales)
    2026/10/08
    October 9: Saint John Henry Newman
    1801–1890
    Memorial; Liturgical color: White

    As mellow as a breeze, as elegant as a swan, he walked alone the path to Rome

    Pope Benedict XVI, a professional theologian, did not typically perform beatification ceremonies, instead entrusting them to his Cardinals. But such was Benedict’s immense respect for Cardinal John Henry Newman’s life and thought that the Pope not only personally celebrated Newman’s beatification Mass but even traveled to England, Newman’s homeland, to do so in September 2010.

    Cardinal Newman is known to most American Catholics as the namesake of the Newman Centers, which are found on the campuses of many secular universities in the United States. Yet Newman’s profile casts a much broader shadow than these university centers alone. John Henry Newman was a man of vast learning culled from a life of prodigious reading. He was a one-man library who mastered both Greek and Latin, had a comprehensive knowledge of Scripture, and was conversant with the theological nuances of every great theologian of the first five centuries of the Church. In addition, Newman elucidated complex theological material in a prose so elegant that the words of his many essays and books seem to glide across the page.

    It was precisely in his writing where Newman’s gifts sparkled. He had that elusive gift called style. Newman’s swan-like gracefulness can be favorably compared with any other man or woman who has ever put pen to paper in the English language. Newman’s ability to express lyrically and precisely his every thought would have counted for little if he had had nothing to say. But, of course, Newman did have something to say. He had much to say, in fact.

    The silken threads of Newman’s words weave like a loom. His intricate sentences thread over and under and around each other, creating a taut and beautiful garment of masterful theology, original insight, and deep historical awareness. When a foe pulled at this or that thread of his theological fabric, Newman would unsheath his pen from its inkwell and wield it like a rapier to slice into shreds his opponent’s arguments, but never his character. Newman did not make personal attacks. Newman’s exquisite works make for compelling reading, provided the reader concurs. If not, Newman was, and is, a gigantic problem who must be confronted.

    John Henry Newman was a convert to Catholicism. He was raised as an Anglican and was somewhat evangelical in his youthful love of the Lord Jesus. As his head sunk deeper and deeper into books in adulthood, however, he concluded that to be immersed in history was to cease to be a Protestant. His conversion to Catholicism shook the English academic world and led to decades of adversarial letters, books, and essays arguing disputed theological points between Newman and his colleagues. But Newman’s ability to express his ideas on the page was so superior, his arguments so unassailable, and the personal cost he paid for converting so agonizing, that the totality of his witness ultimately carried the day.

    Yet Newman was more than just a brain in a jar. His bravery in converting to Catholicism manifested steely resolve and deep virtue not otherwise apparent in his genteel and sensitive personality. His conversion cost him almost everything—status, friendship, income, prestige, academic positions—and on and on. Yet his example emboldened numerous others in subsequent decades to walk the same path to Rome which Newman had first trod alone. A whole generation of English academic converts to Catholicism trace their theological lineage to Cardinal Newman.

    In the last few years of his life, Newman lived like a monk without a desert. Though he was never ordained a Bishop, Father Newman was named a Cardinal by Pope Leo XIII. It was a wreath of laurel crowning a great man’s quiet holiness, brave perseverance, immense erudition, and unequalled polish in composing from within the most dramatic work he ever authored—the story of his own holy life.

    Saint John Henry Newman, from your place in heaven, we ask that your virtues of serenity amid controversy, of erudition amid confusion, and of steadfastness amid attacks provide a holy example to all Christians to persevere in seeking the truth.
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    6 分
  • October 9: St. Denis, Bishop, & Companions, Martyrs

    October 9: St. Denis, Bishop, & Companions, Martyrs
    2026/10/08
    October 9: Saint Denis, Bishop, and Companions, Martyrs
    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 分
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