『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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  • July 18 (U.S.A.): Saint Camillus de Lellis, Priest

    July 18 (U.S.A.): Saint Camillus de Lellis, Priest
    2025/07/18
    July 18 (U.S.A.): Saint Camillus de Lellis, Priest1550–1614In the U.S.A. this Optional Memorial is transferred to July 18Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: WhitePatron Saint of hospitals, nurses, and the sickA one-man Red Cross who burned with love for the sickLike so many saints, Camillus de Lellis ran hard in whatever direction he was heading. When he was a soldier, he ran hard toward the noise of battle. When he was a gambler, he ran hard toward the betting tables. When he was a sinner, he ran hard toward his taste of the day. And when he had a conversion, he ran hard toward the tabernacle. And there, finally, he stopped running. Once he found God, he stayed with Him. Today’s saint spent long hours with Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. Silent contemplation fueled his soul, and he motored through each day with a high-octane love for the sick and the dying, which attracted numerous followers, led to the founding of a religious order, and eventually made Camillus a saint.As a physically large teenager, Camillus became a soldier, alongside his soldier father, to fight the Turks. In the army he learned to gamble, an addiction that matured with him and which ultimately reduced him to abject poverty. At a low point in his life, he volunteered to work at a Franciscan monastery that was under construction and became inspired by a monk to seek admission to the order. But they wouldn’t take him. Camillus had a serious leg wound that refused to heal. He would have been more burden than blessing, so he moved on. He went to Rome to care for the sick in a hospital where he had previously been a patient. But he was repelled by the inadequate medical care, the moral deprivation of the nurses, and the lack of spiritual attention given to the patients. Camillus decided something better was needed for the sick and found the solution when he looked in the mirror.Camillus was inspired by his saintly spiritual director, Saint Philip Neri, to establish a company of consecrated men who would serve the sick purely out of love for God. They served in the hospital of the Holy Spirit, still found today on the Tiber River close to the Vatican. Camillus and his co-workers earned a reputation for providing excellent medical care, for indefatigable service, and for doing their work with an intense spirit of prayer. While carrying out this demanding apostolate, Camillus also attended seminary and was ordained a priest in 1584. As the years passed, more men joined, new houses were established in other cities, and the rule for the Order of Clerks Regular, Ministers of the Infirm (M.I.), simply known as the Camillians, was approved by the Pope in 1591.Father Camillus instituted medical reforms that were rare for his time in regard to cleanliness, diet, infectious diseases, the search for cures, and the separation of healthcare administration from healthcare itself. When his order expanded to other countries, they even staffed a medical field unit accompanying soldiers in battle, an important innovation. This, together with his order’s habit bearing a large, simple, red cross on the front, made Camillus a precursor of the modern Red Cross.Saint Camillus was practical as well as mystical. He wanted the best, physically, spiritually, and morally, for all those he cared for. Every patient was his Lord and Master. No patient, no matter how diseased, foul, dirty, or rude, was beyond his care. Along with his religious brothers, he even took a special fourth vow to care for those with the plague who might infect him. Two Camillians died of the plague in Camillus’ own lifetime. “More love in those hands brother” was his constant refrain to his confreres. His example resonated, and the work of the Camillians continues today in various countries. After his order was firmly established, Saint Camillus succumbed to various diseases in 1614 in Rome. Soon after his death, two doctors from Holy Spirit Hospital came to examine the body, as Camillus was already considered a saint. They cut open his chest wall and removed his heart. An eyewitness wrote that his heart was huge, and as red as a ruby. Camillus was canonized in 1746, and a large statue of him adorns a niche in the central nave of St. Peter’s Basilica. Along with Saint John of God, who was also a soldier, Saint Camillus is the patron saint of hospitals and the sick. Just a few hundred feet from the tourist hordes crushing to enter the Pantheon in the heart of Rome, the modestly sized but luxurious baroque church of Saint Mary Magdalene fronts a small piazza. Inside, usually alone, and resting in peace, are the remains of Saint Camillus de Lellis.Saint Camillus, you knew the rough life of the soldier, gambler, and wanderer. Because of your experiences, you practiced great empathy for the outcast, the sick, and the dying. Help us to be like you, to translate our empathy into action, and to be motivated primarily by love of God.
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    7 分
  • July 16: Our Lady of Mount Carmel

    July 16: Our Lady of Mount Carmel
    2025/07/16
    July 16: Our Lady of Mount Carmel
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
    Patroness of the Carmelites, and for deliverance from Purgatory

    A Crusader legacy enriches the Church’s inner life

    A few miles from Lebanon near Haifa, a large city in the north of present-day Israel, is the Holy Land’s Masada of Catholic prayer and spirituality. Mount Carmel rises high into the sky, dominating the landscape below. On this promontory, one of the most dramatic and memorable scenes of the Old Testament unfolded.

    In the ninth century before Christ, the prophet Elijah made a death challenge to hundreds of pagan prophets to determine if the God of the Jews was greater than Baal. Two altars are built. Wood is laid about both. Two oxen are slaughtered and placed on the altars. The pagans pray to Baal to accept their sacrifice. Nothing. They pray through the morning. Nothing. They pray through the afternoon. Elijah mocks them. They hop around the altar. They slice their skin, mixing their blood with that of the oxen. Still nothing. They move to the side. Elijah steps up and gives commands. Yahweh’s altar is drenched with water. It is drenched twice more. Elijah pleads that Yahweh accept the sacrifice. And then…a ball of fire cuts through the night sky and BAM! The water evaporates and the sacrifice is totally consumed by the blazing fire of the true God. Then the shocking revenge. Elijah slits the throats of the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal at a brook that soon runs red.

    God showed His power in stunning fashion on Mount Carmel centuries before Christ ever walked the earth. Two millennia later, the Holy Land was Crusader territory. Chivalric Orders of Knights had conquered Jerusalem and dotted the Mediterranean Coast with Crusader castles to protect the flow of pilgrims and soldiers to and from the holiest sites of Christianity. Some of those knights and dames knew Mount Carmel was holy ground. So in the crags, folds, and valleys of this isolated mountainscape, pocked with numerous caves and grottoes, hermits retreated to lead lives of prayer, fasting, and penance. When political and social realities changed by the end of the thirteenth century, and Christians once again lost the Holy Land, these hermits returned home and established new “Mount Carmels” throughout Europe, evoking the spiritual isolation of their lost mountain in Northern Israel.

    The Order of Mount Carmel is an engine room of prayer, a religious family of both male and female contemplative religious. Carmelites’ radical dedication to contemplative prayer, detachment, poverty, and death to self has attracted and formed men and women of the greatest holiness: Saints Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, Thérèse of Lisieux, and Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein). Integral to Carmelite spirituality is the Virgin Mary under the title of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

    The origins of today’s liturgical feast are somewhat unclear, but the underlying devotion is not. The Virgin Mary’s steady, quiet presence in the life of our Lord is notable for its subtlety. Her inner life and secret generosity is what attracts, more than her actions or speech. No word is limited to a book. The Word of God existed from eternity in the Trinity, became flesh, taught, performed miracles, died and rose long before the Word was written down. Mary is the mother of that rich Word. Her word of “Yes” to the Archangel Gabriel gave space for the Word to dwell among us.

    In his 1994 book “Crossing the Threshold of Hope,” Pope Saint John Paul II wrote that “Carmelite mysticism begins at the point where the reflections of Buddha end…” The goal of spirituality is not merely to renounce the evil world but to unite the soul to the personal God of Jesus Christ. Purification and detachment are not ends in themselves. They help one cling to God more easily. Our Lady of Mount Carmel is not a chameleon. She doesn’t change colors to satisfy any and all “spiritualities.” She is the mother of God and the icon, par excellence, of the queen of the virtues—humility.

    Our Lady of Mount Carmel, through your example of humble docility to the will of God, we seek your intercession to make us more prayerful, more detached, more recollected, and more committed to whatever God asks of us.
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    6 分
  • July 15: Saint Bonaventure, Bishop and Doctor

    July 15: Saint Bonaventure, Bishop and Doctor
    2025/07/15
    July 15: Saint Bonaventure, Bishop and Doctor
    1221–1274
    Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
    Patron Saint of those with intestinal problems

    He seemed to have escaped the curse of Adam’s sin

    The scholarly heft of Saint Bonaventure legitimized the eccentric Saint Francis of Assisi. Saint Bonaventure was to the Franciscans what Thomas Aquinas was to the Dominicans. These contemporaries form twin summits of scholastic thought, first-rate intellectuals whose eminent writings lent their young, revolutionary religious orders credibility. Aquinas and Bonaventure received their doctorates on the very same day and are shown as equals in Raphael’s Disputation of the Holy Sacrament. Both Thomas and Bonaventure were also pious, poor, humble, and holy, giving their theological work even greater weight. Saint Bonaventure was part of that huge influx of second-generation Franciscans who never knew their founder. He joined the order in 1243, received his doctorate in theology from the University of Paris, and became master of the Franciscan school at Paris in 1253. In 1257 he was elected minister general of the entire Franciscan order. He was just thirty-six years old.

    The pressing responsibilities of religious leadership constrained Bonaventure from total dedication to the life of the mind. He had limited time to read, write, and do research once he was elected head of his order, making the first half of his life his most prolific period of scholarship. But that scholarship was so comprehensive as to be a complete system of thought. He wrote on everything—fundamental theology, the nature of dogma, Scripture and history, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, angels, creation, the virtues—and all of it was suffused with a mature spirituality focused on the individual soul progressing toward God. With this intensely spiritual focus, Bonaventure is said to be more Augustinian in his theology than Aquinas, who is more Aristotelian. The former’s goal was to love, the latter’s to speculate and to know. Bonaventure’s writings on dogma were influential at the Council of Trent and continue to be read.

    Bonaventure led his order in a period of sharp tension among Franciscans over the legacy of Saint Francis. Should the order own property directly or just use property owned by others? Should the brothers be educated and teach or remain simple and only preach? Should the brothers live in the growing cities of the medieval world or stay in the country like Francis himself? Should the brothers in Northern Europe be allowed to wear shoes or must they go barefoot like Saint Francis commanded? These, and many other questions, cleaved the body Franciscan. Many of the diverse interpretations of Francis’ legacy were unresolvable, and, in the early sixteenth century, the order morphed into three entities, each embodying a particular spiritual emphasis.

    Saint Bonaventure navigated these sharp tensions with great skill. His erudition, great patience, and love of others sewed the diverse patches of Franciscanism into a whole cloth. He had to chastise, punish, and correct too. But he was outstanding in listening to every side before making his final decisions. That Franciscanism survived is thanks to today’s saint, who has been called the Franciscans’ “Second Founder.”

    In 1273 Bonaventure was made a cardinal bishop by the pope. Knowing of this Franciscan’s humility and his refusal to accept a previous episcopal appointment, the pope inserted into his bull an order that Bonaventure could not decline the honor. Bonaventure was in the kitchen washing dishes when the papal envoys arrived with the news. Saint Bonaventure died with his boots on, while participating in and aiding the pope at the Council of Lyon in 1274. Aquinas had died on the way to the same Council. Bonaventure was buried in Lyon, canonized in 1482, and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1557. Unfortunately, his tomb was desecrated by French Protestants and revolutionaries in later centuries, and his body has been permanently lost. His first professor at Paris, Alexander of Hales, gave him a supreme compliment. He said that Bonaventure “seemed to have escaped the curse of Adam's sin.”

    Saint Bonaventure, you had few equals in knowledge, love, prayer, and virtue. Through your heavenly intercession, help all Catholics to progress toward union with God by the many paths you yourself walked so long before us.
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    6 分

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