4 JUNE – SAINT FRANCIS CARACCIOLO (Confessor)

Ascanio Caracciolo was born in the town of Santa Maria della Villa in the Abruzzi in 1563. From his earliest years he showed great marks of piety. When he was a young man, he had a severe illness and on his recovery determined to serve God and give himself up to the service of his neighbour. He went to himself to Naples where he was ordained priest, enrolled himself in a devout confraternity, and gave himself up to contemplation and the gaining of souls to God, in which work he showed himself an unwearied comforter to such persons as were condemned to death.

It came to pass that those two great servants of God, John Augustine Adomo and Fabricius Caracciolo wrote a letter to a certain person in which they exhorted him to found a new religious Institute. But by mistake it was delivered to Francis Caracciolo. The newness of the idea, and the strange ways of God’s Providence took possession of his mind, and he joyfully added himself to their company. They withdrew themselves to the wilderness of the Camaldolese, and there concerted the rules of the new Order. Then they went to Rome and obtained the confirmation of their work from Pope Sixtus V, who wished that they should be called Minor Clerks Regular, since they added to the three accustomed vows a fourth binding themselves not to seek preferment in the Church.

Having made his solemn profession, Ascanio, moved by the special love and devotion he had to the holy Francis of Assisi, took the name of Francis. After two years John Adorno died and Francis was made the head of the Order against his will. In this office he gave a brilliant example of all virtues. Devoted to the prosperity of the Institute, he earnestly sought the blessing of God on it by assiduous prayer, tears and constant maceration of his body. In this work he travelled to Spain in the guise of a pilgrim and begging his bread from door to door. In these journeys he suffered very great hardships and was helped by God. He had to work hard to attain his wishes, but through the generosity of the Catholic Kings Philip II and Philip III, he overcame with his fortitude of soul the opposition of all that withstood him and founded several houses of his Order, which he eventually did in Italy also.

He so excelled in humility that when he came to Rome he went to an almshouse and there chose to be associated to a leper: moreover he firmly refused all ecclesiastical dignities offered to him by Pope Paul V. He preserved his virginity unspotted, and when certain women attacked his chastity, he gained over their souls to Christ. Towards the most divine Mystery of the Eucharist he was drawn with burning tenderness of love, and would pass almost entire nights without sleep in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. This holy custom he established in his Order, to be kept up as its peculiar mark. He was a zealous propagator of the cult of the Mother of God. He was all aflame with the love of his neighbours. He was gifted with prophecy and the discerning of spirits.

At the age of 44, while he was continuing long at prayer in the Holy House of Loreto, it was made known to him that the end of his earthly life was at hand. He immediately took the road to the Abruzzi and was seized with a mortal fever at the house of the disciples of Saint Philip Neri in the town of Agnone. He received with great devotion the Sacraments of the Church, and on the day preceding the Nones of June, in 1608, it being the eve of the Feast of Corpus Christi, he fell asleep in the Lord. His sacred body was carried to Naples, and there interred in the Church of Saint Mary the Greater. He was beatified by Pope Clement XIV in 1769 and was canonised by Pope Pius VII in 1807.

Dom Prosper Gueranger:

The good things brought to this world by the Divine Spirit continue to be revealed in the holy Liturgy. Francis Caracciolo is given to us this day as another type of the sublime fecundity produced on Earth by Christianity. Now, Faith is the principle of this supernatural fecundity in the saints, just as it was in Abraham, the Father of all believers. It brings forth to the Church isolated members or entire nations alike: from it too proceed the multitudinous families of Religious Orders who, in their fidelity in following the divers tracks traced out for them by their founders, are the chief portion of that royal and varied adornment with which the Bride is resplendently bedecked at the right hand of her Divine Spouse. This is the very thought expressed by the Sovereign Pontiff Pius VII on the day of the canonisation of our saint, wishing, as he said, “to right the judgement of such as may, perhaps, have appreciated the religious life at a low rate, according to the vain deceits of a worldly point of view, and not according to the just measure of the knowledge of Jesus Christ.”

That century of universal ruin in which the voice of Christ’s Vicar was raised addressing the whole world on this solemn occasion, resembled, but in still darker hue, the calamitous age of the pretended Reform in which Francis, like so many others, had proved by his works and by his life, the indefectibility of the Church’s holiness. Let us listen once more to the words of the same Pontiff:

“The Bride of Christ, the Church, is now become accustomed to pursue her pilgrim career amid persecutions from men and consolations from God. Through the saints raised up in all ages by His almighty Hand, God fulfils His promise to the end, making her ever to be a City seated on a mountain, a beacon, the clear light of which must needs reach the eyes of all who do not, through prejudice, voluntarily shut their eyes not to see. The while her enemies band together, vainly plotting her destruction, saying: When will she die? When will her name perish? Crowned with ever increasing splendour by the new warriors she sends as victors to Heaven, the Church remains ever glorious, ever declaring to all coming generations the might of the Lord’s strong arm.”

The sixteenth century heard at its birth the most terrific blasphemy ever uttered against the Bride of the Son of God: that by which she was named the harlot of Babylon. Yet did she, all spotless Queen — in the very teeth of heresy impotent to produce one real virtue on Earth — prove herself to be the legitimate Bride by reason of her admirable efflorescence in new Orders sprung from her bosom in but a few years’ space, and ready to meet the exigencies of the novel situation created by Luther’s revolt. The return of ancient Orders to their primitive fervour, the establishment of the Society of Jesus, of the Theatines, of the Brothers of Saint John of God, of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri, of the Clerks Regular of Saint Jerome Emilian, and those of Saint Camillus de Lellis — sufficed not to the Divine Spirit. As though on purpose to mark the superabundant fruitfulness of the Bride, He raised up at the close of the same century another religious family, the special characteristic of which was to be the organisation of mortification and continual prayer among its members by the incessant use of Christian penance and by the perpetual adoration of the Most Holy Sacrament.

Sixtus V received with joy these new recruits for the great campaign. To distinguish them from all other Orders of Clerks Regular, and as a proof of his specially paternal affection, the illustrious Pontiff, himself a Friar Minor, embodied a title so dear to his own heart in that which he assigned to these newcomers, calling them: The Minor Clerks Regular. With a like view of approximation to the Seraphic Order, our Saint of today, the first General of this Institute, changed his name Ascanius for that of Francis. It seemed as though Heaven too would weld together the Patriarch of Assisi and Francis Caraeciolo by giving to each the same span of life, namely, forty-four years. The founder of the Minor Clerks Regular (like his glorious predecessor and patron), was one of those men of whom Holy Scripture says that, having lived a short space, they fulfilled a long time (Wisdom iv. 13). Numerous prodigies revealed during his lifetime the virtues which his humility would fain have concealed. Scarce had his soul left this Earth and his body been interred, than crowds flocked to the tomb where the constant voice of miracles bore witness to the high favour with God enjoyed by him whose mortal remains there reposed.

To the sovereign authority constituted by Jesus Christ in the Church, solely is it reserved, however, to pronounce authentically on the sanctity of any, even the most illustrious, of her dead. As long as the judgement of the Supreme Pontiff has formulated nothing, private devotion is quite free to testify gratitude or confidence in regard of the departed worthy of it. But all such demonstrations as, more or less, resemble public cultus, are prohibited by a rigorous and wise law of the Church. Unfortunately, certain imprudences contrary to this law formulated in the celebrated Decrees of Urban VIII drew down twenty years after the death of our saint all the severity of the Inquisition on some of his spiritual children, and retarded by a whole century the introduction of his cause to the tribunal of the Sacred Congregation of Rites. It was necessary that the witnesses of the abuses which had incurred the law should first disappear from the scene. But consequently the witnesses of the holy life of Francis had likewise disappeared. Being, therefore, obliged to recur to mere auricular testimony in her pronouncing of judgement on the heroic virtues practised by him, Rome now exacted from ocular witnesses the proof of four, instead of the usual two, miracles required in a process of Beatification.

WELL was your love for the Divine Sacrament of the Altar rewarded, Francis. You had the glory of being called to the Banquet of our Eternal Home at the very hour when the Church on Earth was chanting the praises of the Sacred Victim at the first Vespers of the great Festival that year-by-year hails this Mystery of mysteries. Your own feast day occurring, as it ever does, close to this Solemnity of Corpus Christi, continues still to invite us men, as you were wont to do in life, to come and peer in adoration into the depths of this Mystery of Love. The mysterious harmony of the Cycle is all disposed by Divine Wisdom, seeing that His sweet Providence fixes the season at which each Saint is summoned to receive the crown of bliss. Thus the post of honour earned by you is in the Sanctuary itself close to the Divine Host on our altars.

“The zeal of your house has eaten me up” (Psalms lxviii. 10): this was your heart’s cry on Earth. These words, less those of David, than of the Man-God Himself (John ii. 17), did indeed fill your heart to overflowing so that after your death they were found engraved on the lifeless flesh of your heart, proving, as it were, what had been the one impetus of its every pulsation and of your desires. Hence resulted the need you had of continual prayer, as well as that ever correlative ardour of yours for penance, the two-fold characteristic of your religious family, and which you would fain have seen in the hearts of all. Prayer and penance: yes, these two alone fix man in his right position before God. Vouchsafe to preserve this precious deposit amid your spiritual Sons, Francis, so that by their zeal in propagating the spirit of their Father they may make it become the treasure also of the entire world.

Also on this day according to the ROMAN MARTYOLOGY:

At Rome, the holy martyrs Aretius and Dacian.

At Sisseck in Illyria, in the time of the governor Galerius, St. Quirinus, bishop. Prudentius relates that for the faith of Christ he was precipitated into a river, with a millstone tied to his neck, but as the stone floated on the water, he exhorted for a long time the Christians who were present not to be terrified by his punishment, nor to waver in the faith, and then God heard his prayers to be drowned, that he might attain to the glory of martyrdom.

At Brescia, St. Clateus, bishop and martyr, under the emperor Nero.

In Pannonia, the holy martyrs Rutilus and his companions.

At Arras, St. Saturnina, virgin and martyr.

At Tivoli, St. Quirinus, martyr.

At Constantinople, St. Metrophanes, bishop and renowned confessor.

At Milevis in Numidia, St. Optatus, bishop, celebrated for learning and holiness.

At Verona, St. Alexander, bishop.

And in other places, many other holy martyrs, confessors and virgins.

Thanks be to God.