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Catholic Saints & Feasts

Catholic Saints & Feasts

De : 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 Christianisme Ministère et évangélisme Spiritualité
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    • December 6: Saint Nicholas, Bishop

      December 6: Saint Nicholas, Bishop
      Dec 5 2025
      December 6: Saint Nicholas, Bishop c. Third–Fourth Century Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White Patron Saint of Russia, sailors, merchants, and children Santa Claus signed the Nicene Creed Traditions the world over are so embedded in the rhythms of daily life that their ubiquity goes unnoticed. Why a birthday cake with lighted candles? Why make a wish and then blow those candles out? The origin of this charming tradition is obscure. Why shake hands, toast by clinking glasses, cross fingers for good luck, or have bridesmaids? The sources of many traditions are so historically remote and culturally elusive as to allow diverse interpretations of their meaning. Today’s saint is without doubt, however, the man behind the massively celebrated tradition of Santa Claus, the most well-known Christmas figure after Jesus and the Three Kings. Santa Claus’ mysterious nocturnal visits to lavish children with gifts at Christmastime is not a tradition whose origin is lost in the mists of history. It is a tradition firmly rooted in Christianity.  Little is known about the life of Saint Nicholas, besides that he was the Catholic Bishop of Myra in Asia Minor in the early fourth century. It is likely that he suffered under the persecution of Diocletian and certain that he later attended the Council of Nicea in 325. "Nicholas of Myra of Lycia" appears on one of the earliest and most reliable lists of the Bishops at Nicea. Some of the bishops at Nicea looked like soldiers who had just crawled off the battlefield; eyes gouged out, skin charred black, stumps for legs. These were the front-line torture victims of Diocelatian. The Emperor Constantine had called the Council, and when he entered the dim hall to inaugurate the great gathering, this colossus, the most powerful man in the world, dressed in robes of purple, slowly walked among the hushed and twisted bodies and did something shocking and beautiful. He stopped and kissed each eyeless cheek, each scar, gash, wound, and mangled stub where an arm had once hung. With this noble gesture, the healing could finally begin. The Church was free. The mitred heads wept tears of joy, and Saint Nicholas was among them.  At his death, Saint Nicholas was buried in his see city. Less than a century later, a church was built in his honor in Myra and became a site of pilgrimage. And the Emperor Justinian, in the mid-500s, renovated a long-existing church dedicated to Saint Nicholas in Constantinople. In Rome, a Greek community was worshipping in a basilica dedicated to Saint Nicholas around 600. The church can still be visited today. These churches, and hundreds of others named for Saint Nicholas, prove that devotion to our saint was widespread not long after his death. When Myra was overrun by Muslim Turks in the 1000s, there was a risk that the saint’s bones would disappear. So in 1087, sailors from Bari, Italy, committed a holy theft and moved Saint Nicholas’ relics to their own hometown. In 1089 the Pope came to Bari to dedicate a new church to Saint Nicholas. And just a few years later, Bari became the rendezvous point for the First Crusade. Saint Nicholas was the patron saint of travelers and sailors, making him popular with the crusading knights. These knights, in turn, later brought the devotion to Saint Nicholas they learned in Bari back to their villages dotting the countryside of Central and Western Europe. Thus it happened that a saint famous along the shores of the Mediterranean became, in ways not totally understood, the source of gift-giving traditions that perdure until today in every corner of Europe. Legends state that Nicholas saved three sisters from lives of shame by secretly dropping small sacks of gold through their family’s window at night, thus giving each a marriage dowry. Other legends relate that Nicholas secretly put coins in shoes that were left out for him. Nicholas’ legacy of gift-giving became a Central-European and Anglo-Saxon expression of the gift-giving formerly exclusive to the Three Kings. Christmas night gift-giving in Northern lands thus slowly replaced the more biblically solid traditions of giving gifts on the Feast of the Epiphany, a custom more popular in Southern Europe and in lands which inherited its traditions. The antiquity of the Church means it has played a matchless role in the formation of Western culture, a role that no faux holidays or new “tradition” can replicate. Santa Claus has roots. He wears red for the martyrs. He dons a hat resembling a bishop’s mitre. He often holds a sceptre similar to a bishop’s crozier. And he distributes gifts to children in humble anonymity on the night of Christ’s birth. Old Saint Nick, Father Christmas, Kris Kringle, or Santa Claus is real, in one sense. In all likelihood, he signed the Nicene Creed. Our “Santa,” then, was an orthodox Catholic bishop who argued for correct teaching about our Trinitarian God. The gift of the truth was, then, his first and most ...
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      7 min
    • December 4: Saint John Damascene, Priest and Doctor

      December 4: Saint John Damascene, Priest and Doctor
      Dec 4 2024
      December 4: Saint John Damascene, Priest and Doctor
      c. 674–749
      Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
      Patron Saint of icon painters and theology students

      A monk defends images from Christian attack

      “Christ...did not save us by paintings,” a Synod of Bishops declared in Paris in 825. God, it could be added, did not become an icon. He became a man, and so sanctified creation itself, not just art. In the eighth century, a raging debate, even violence, over the role of images in Christianity tore at the fabric of the undivided Church. The deep wounds inflicted in the body of Christ by the iconoclastic controversy took decades to close. Today’s saint helped the healing start.

      John of Damascene explained in clear, deep, and evocative language the theological significance of venerating images. He thus helped bishops, emperors, and popes to think their way out of the controversy. For his learned defense of images, Saint John Damascene was declared a Doctor of the Church centuries later, in 1890. Ironically, John’s brave defense of icons was possible because he lived behind the Muslim curtain, in Syria. He lived beyond the reach of the long arm of Constantinople, a city whose emperors opposed icons partly to appease their new and violent geopolitical neighbors, the Muslims, whose mosques were adorned with geometric patterns, not faces and bodies.

      John of Damascus (or Damascene) is known primarily through his writings. The details of his life are few. When his native Syria was overrun in the 630s by a new, martial religion that blew like a strong wind out of Saudi Arabia, John’s family served in the local caliph’s administration. The Muslim conquest was facilitated by the local population of subjugated, but educated, Christians and Jews who were conquered but not displaced. They carried out the everyday tasks of empire building of which the illiterate horsemen of the desert knew nothing. John and his family were part of this large administrative class of Arabic non-Muslims. Our saint, then, personally lived the epochal transition of Syria from a Constantinople-focused Christian culture to a Mecca-facing Muslim one.

      After receiving a complete education from a captive Catholic priest, John abandoned his secular career and entered a monastery near Jerusalem to become a priest and monk. The rest of his life was dedicated to his own perfection and to theological and literary pursuits. Islam’s prohibition of images forced Christian theologians to defend and explain something that had never before been challenged—the ubiquitous Christian use, in both public and private, of icons, statues, medals, crucifixes, and other forms of art. John was the first to distinguish between the worship rendered to God alone and the veneration given to images and those they represent. John noted that the saint is not the paint on the wood any more than Jesus is the ink on the page of the Gospel. Such distinctions were needed to respond to both Islam and to Old Testament strictures against using images, an exception to which was the God-sanctioned adornments on the Ark of the Covenant.

      John Damascene argued that when God took flesh He ended the era of the misty, faceless God. Because God chose to be visible, the Christian can venerate the Creator of matter who became matter for man’s sake. Salvation was achieved via created matter, so we venerate that matter not absolutely, but contingently. Did not Christ hang on the wood of the cross? Did He not consecrate bread and wine? Was He not baptized in water? The matter of which images are made comes from God Himself and thus shares in His goodness. Even the Sacraments make use of the elements of creation to become vehicles of God’s grace. John’s ideas won the day, long after his death, at the Second Council of Nicea in 787, which condemned iconoclasm. From that point until the rise of Protestantism, art was correctly understood in Western culture as an extended celebration of the Incarnation. When we gaze in wonder at the mellow glow of stained glass, marvel at the smooth serenity of the face of Mary in Michelangelo’s Pietà, or wonder at the explosion of the baroque in an Italian church, we should whisper thanks to today’s saint for saving the day just when it needed to be saved.

      Saint John Damascene, you studied and wrote so that the illiterate of your time could “read” icons and so know and love the Lord by just looking at Him, His mother, and His saints. Help all catechists to use their education to defend the faith of those unable to explain it to themselves.
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      6 min
    • December 3: Saint Francis Xavier, Priest

      December 3: Saint Francis Xavier, Priest
      Dec 2 2024
      December 3: Saint Francis Xavier, Priest
      1506–1552
      Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
      Patron Saint of foreign missions

      A missionary blazes a path for Christ in India and Japan

      Today’s great missionary knelt on the floor next to Saint Ignatius Loyola and five other men in a church on Montmartre overlooking Paris in 1534 and took private vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience to the Pope. It was the start of the Jesuits. Francis Xavier would be ordained a priest three years later in Venice and, in 1540, would sail from Lisbon, Portugal, to India, never to return.  The thirteen-month sea journey was brutal, but Francis was as tough as bark. He held his own with all the sailors, slaves, and criminals on board who were seeking to start anew for reasons noble and otherwise. When Francis arrived in Goa, India, he and his two confreres found a Portuguese settlement about thirty years old. As was sadly typical, the greatest hindrance to the success of Spanish, Portuguese, and French missionaries was their own countrymen. Slave traders, merchants, pirates, nobles, and crown officials gave a contrary Christian witness, which undercut the priests’ own teaching and example. It was said that when the Portuguese whipped their servants, they counted the lashes on their rosary beads.

      Francis’ first goal was to evangelize the settlers. He preached, taught, heard confessions, and encouraged the Portuguese to live their faith if they harbored any hope of winning India for Christ. After working among his own for a few years establishing the basic structures of a church, including a seminary, Francis went on the first of his incessant voyages, the sub-missions inside of his greater mission to Asia. Among the people of the islands near modern-day Sri Lanka, Francis slept on the dirt like they did. He ate rice and drank water like they did. He put the Our Father and Hail Mary to music and so made these prayers easier to remember. He became a father to a humble people and baptized so many thousands that helpers had to hold up his arm to continue his sacramental work. That very arm is found today in a reliquary in the Jesuit’s mother church in Rome, the Gesù, near the tomb of St. Ignatius Loyola.

      Francis used Goa as his base as he departed on one missionary journey after another among the islands off of Southeast Asia. He wrote letters to Ignatius and to the King of Portugal describing his labors and plans, bemoaning the lack of priests and the unethical behavior of his fellow Europeans. On one journey, he heard of an archipelago that no European had yet entered. It was Japan. Francis started to plan and, in 1549, he was the first missionary to plant his foot into the soil of the Land of the Rising Sun. The work was difficult. As so many Europeans noted, Japanese culture was fundamentally unlike other Asian cultures. The Japanese were intellectually sophisticated, sensitive to slights, honorable, open to reason, and naturally inquisitive. But the language was impenetrable, the leaders often hostile, and the monks welcoming only until they realized that Francis’ religion was a rival to their own. An expert missionary, Francis had to create a neologism adapted from Latin—Deusu—to convey the Christian concept of the word God. No equivalent existed in Japanese.

      After little visible success in Japan, Francis had further adventures on land and sea before he embarked on a plan to enter the vast and forbidden territory of China. But it was not to be. On December 2, 1552, Francis Xavier died of fever at the age of forty-six on a small island a few miles distant from the shores of mainland China. Like Moses, he died seeing the promised land but never entered it. Francis was buried in a shallow grave in the sand as four people looked on. His body was covered with lime in case anyone wanted to recover it later. They did. This Apostle to the Indies and Japan was canonized in 1622 and is considered the Church’s greatest missionary after Saint Paul. His body is largely incorrupt and rests in a glass coffin in a church in Goa, India.

      Saint Francis Xavier, your indefatigable journeying to spread the Gospel inspired generations of missionaries. May your legacy of generosity and vigor continue in us as we convert others through our own witness of virtue, work, and charity for all.
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      6 min
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