Saint Catherine of Siena

 

29 APRIL 2014. Today we celebrate her Feast, our spiritual Mama: patroness of the Dominican laity.

In your nature,
eternal Godhead,

I shall come to know my nature.

And what is my nature, boundless love?

It is fire,

because you are nothing but a fire of love.

And you have given humankind

a share in this nature,

for by the fire of love

you created us.

And so with all other people

and every created thing;

you made them out of love.

O ungrateful people!

What nature has your God given you?

His very own nature!

Are you not ashamed to cut yourself off from such a noble thing

through the guilt of deadly sin?

O eternal Trinity,

my sweet love!

You, light,

give us light.

You, wisdom,

give us wisdom.

You, supreme strength,

strengthen us.

Today, eternal God,

let our cloud be dissipated

so that we may perfectly know and follow your Truth

in truth,

with a free and simple heart.

God, come to our assistance!

Lord, make haste to help us!

Amen.

Feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary

31 MAY 2010. Today the Church celebrates the Feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. From today's Gospel reading from the Gospel of Saint Luke, we hear of Mary's journey to visit her cousin Elizabeth, and the immortal words of Elizabeth's greeting:

Mary set out
and traveled to the hill country in haste
to a town of Judah,
where she entered the house of Zechariah
and greeted Elizabeth.
When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting,
the infant leaped in her womb,
and Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit,
cried out in a loud voice and said,
“Most blessed are you among women,
and blessed is the fruit of your womb.
And how does this happen to me,
that the mother of my Lord should come to me?
For at the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears,
the infant in my womb leaped for joy.
Blessed are you who believed
that what was spoken to you by the Lord
would be fulfilled.”

And Mary said:
“My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord;
my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.
From this day all generations will call me blessed:
the Almighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his Name.

He has mercy on those who fear him
in every generation.
He has shown the strength of his arm,
he has scattered the proud in their conceit.
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has come to the help of his servant Israel
for he has remembered his promise of mercy,
the promise he made to our fathers,
to Abraham and his children for ever.”

Mary remained with her about three months
and then returned to her home.

(Lk 1, 39-56)

Today's feast originated with the Franciscan Order in the medieval period. Originally, the feast was recommended by Saint Bonaventure, after which it was adopted and spread by Franciscan religious throughout Europe. In A.D. 1389, Pope Urban VI, as a part of his efforts to end the Great Western Schism, inserted the feast on the General Roman Calendar and assigned it to the date of 2 July. Today's feast continued to be celebrated on 2 July, until A.D. 1969 when Pope Paul VI moved it to today's date--31 May--to harmonize better with the Gospel account by falling between the Solemnity of the Annunciation of the Lord (25 March) and the Solemnity of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist (24 June).

I pray that all of us today, in our commemoration of this feast, will also keep hearts that leap for joy at the sound of Mary's greeting to us, her children on earth, beckoning us to draw closer to Her immaculate heart and the Sacred Heart of her Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.

Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter

22 FEBRUARY 2010. Today, 110 candles will be lit in St. Peter's Basilica in the annual rituals that surround the Church's celebration of the Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter. Today's feast, however, is not a feast in honor of a piece of furniture--a chair. No. Today's feast celebrates the primacy of the Pope as the head of the unified, catholic Church and the role of the Church as the servant of the communion of the whole Church.

The Chair of Saint Peter is a cathedra that is encased within a magnificent gilt bronze reliquary sculpted by Gian Lorenzo Benini at the height of the seventeenth century. Like many Medieval relequaries, Bernini's sculpture takes the form of the thing that it encases. While for years it was thought that the chair encased in Bernini's sculpture was actually a chair used by Saint Peter, studies performed at the request of Pope Paul VI in 1967 have actually shown the chair to be from the ninth century. The Vatican tour guide for St. Peter's Basilica now relates that the chair was given as a gift by Charles the Bald to the Pope in A.D. 875.

 Chair of Saint Peter

 
Looking upon Bernini's great work cannot compare to mere pictures and a bit of text on these pages, but there are a couple of aspects of the sculpture that require description. First, the reliquary chair appears to be supported effortlessly on splayed scrolling bars put aloft by four over-lifesize sculptures of  great Doctors of the Church, two from the West (Saints Ambrose and Augustine) and two from the East (Saints Athanasius and John Chrysostom). The Chair of Saint Peter appears to hover over the altar in the Basilica's apse, and is lit from a great oval window above that displays an image of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove, illuminating the surrounding gilded sunrays and sculpted clouds.

 
The Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter is an ancient celebration in the Church's history, dating to A.D. 354, when the fest was listed in the Chronographia Romana, an ancient calendar of civic and religious observances. While the feast initially celebrated the beginning of the episcopacy of Saint Peter, with a focus on the primacy of the Pope, over the centuries the feast has come to focus on the service of the Pope as the head of the unified Church. Shown in Bernini's work, Christ is handing the keys to Saint Peter on one side of the chair, while the other side is balanced with the image of Christ washing the feet of the twelve.

Today, we might understand the chair of Saint Peter this way: the cathedra is not a throne, but a teacher's chair. It does not subject and weigh down the Doctors of the Church who support it, but they are drawn to the chair. They gather around it.

Let us too gather around the Holy Father and our Church!

Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul

25 JANUARY 2010. Today the Church celebrates the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul. In today's feast, we recount the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, who after an extensive record of brutalizing and persecuting Christians, became the great Apostle Paul. Thirteen of the epistles in the New Testament are attributed to Saint Paul.

While some sources say the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul is a relatively new development on the liturgical calendar, I have not found further detail of the feast's history.

The conversion story of Saint Paul is mentioned in a number of places in the New Testament, but the conversion story is told three times in the Acts of the Apostles. First, it is told as a third person narrative:

Now Saul, still breathing murderous threats against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues in Damascus, that, if he should find any men or women who belonged to the Way, he might bring them back to Jerusalem in chains. On his journey, as he was nearing Damascus, a light from the sky suddenly flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?" He said, "Who are you, sir?" The reply came, "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. Now get up and go into the city and you will be told what you must do." The men who were traveling with him stood speechless, for they heard the voice but could see no one. Saul got up from the ground, but when he opened his eyes he could see nothing; so they led him by the hand and brought him to Damascus. For three days he was unable to see, and he neither ate nor drank.

There was a disciple in Damascus named Ananias, and the Lord said to him in a vision, "Ananias." He answered, "Here I am, Lord." The Lord said to him, "Get up and go to the street called Straight and ask at the house of Judas for a man from Tarsus named Saul. He is there praying, and (in a vision) he has seen a man named Ananias come in and lay [his] hands on him, that he may regain his sight." But Ananias replied, "Lord, I have heard from many sources about this man, what evil things he has done to your holy ones in Jerusalem. And here he has authority from the chief priests to imprison all who call upon your name." But the Lord said to him, "Go, for this man is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before Gentiles, kings, and Israelites, and I will show him what he will have to suffer for my name." So Ananias went and entered the house; laying his hands on him, he said, "Saul, my brother, the Lord has sent me, Jesus who appeared to you on the way by which you came, that you may regain your sight and be filled with the holy Spirit." Immediately things like scales fell from his eyes and he regained his sight. He got up and was baptized, and when he had eaten, he recovered his strength.

(Acts 9, 1-19 NAB).

Second, Saint Paul himself tells the story of his conversion when he is arrested in Jerusalem:

"My brothers and fathers, listen to what I am about to say to you in my defense." When they heard him addressing them in Hebrew they became all the more quiet. And he continued, "I am a Jew, born in Tarsus in Cilicia, but brought up in this city. At the feet of Gamaliel I was educated strictly in our ancestral law and was zealous for God, just as all of you are today. I persecuted this Way to death, binding both men and women and delivering them to prison. Even the high priest and the whole council of elders can testify on my behalf. For from them I even received letters to the brothers and set out for Damascus to bring back to Jerusalem in chains for punishment those there as well.

"On that journey as I drew near to Damascus, about noon a great light from the sky suddenly shone around me. I fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to me, 'Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?' I replied, 'Who are you, sir?' And he said to me, 'I am Jesus the Nazorean whom you are persecuting.' My companions saw the light but did not hear the voice of the one who spoke to me. I asked, 'What shall I do, sir?' The Lord answered me, 'Get up and go into Damascus, and there you will be told about everything appointed for you to do.' Since I could see nothing because of the brightness of that light, I was led by hand by my companions and entered Damascus.

"A certain Ananias, a devout observer of the law, and highly spoken of by all the Jews who lived there, came to me and stood there and said, 'Saul, my brother, regain your sight.' And at that very moment I regained my sight and saw him. Then he said, 'The God of our ancestors designated you to know his will, to see the Righteous One, and to hear the sound of his voice; for you will be his witness before all to what you have seen and heard. Now, why delay? Get up and have yourself baptized and your sins washed away, calling upon his name.'

"After I had returned to Jerusalem and while I was praying in the temple, I fell into a trance and saw the Lord saying to me, 'Hurry, leave Jerusalem at once, because they will not accept your testimony about me.' But I replied, 'Lord, they themselves know that from synagogue to synagogue I used to imprison and beat those who believed in you. And when the blood of your witness Stephen was being shed, I myself stood by giving my approval and keeping guard over the cloaks of his murderers.' Then he said to me, 'Go, I shall send you far away to the Gentiles.'"

(Acts 22, 1-21)

Finally, Saint Paul describes his conversion for King Agrippa in his own defense:

I myself once thought that I had to do many things against the name of Jesus the Nazorean, and I did so in Jerusalem. I imprisoned many of the holy ones with the authorization I received from the chief priests, and when they were to be put to death I cast my vote against them. Many times, in synagogue after synagogue, I punished them in an attempt to force them to blaspheme; I was so enraged against them that I pursued them even to foreign cities.

"On one such occasion I was traveling to Damascus with the authorization and commission of the chief priests.At midday, along the way, O king, I saw a light from the sky, brighter than the sun, shining around me and my traveling companions.We all fell to the ground and I heard a voice saying to me in Hebrew, 'Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It is hard for you to kick against the goad.'And I said, 'Who are you, sir?' And the Lord replied, 'I am Jesus whom you are persecuting.Get up now, and stand on your feet. I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you as a servant and witness of what you have seen (of me) and what you will be shown. I shall deliver you from this people and from the Gentiles to whom I send you, to open their eyes that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may obtain forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among those who have been consecrated by faith in me.'

(Acts 16, 9-18)

As it is by now apparent, the recounting of Saint Paul's conversion thrice is an indication of the great importance it held for the Scripture writers. And its holds great importance for us too.

Each of us, no matter our circumstance or background, can be an instrument of the Lord on the earth. Even those, like Saint Paul, that have persecuted the Church can experience a conversion and go on to serve Christ. It is never too late and nothing any of us has ever done or failed to do can be too big for God. Have faith, that you too can be an apostle of Christ like Saint Paul.

IMAGE: The Conversion of St. Paul, Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640).