1 SEPTEMBER – SAINT GILES (Abbot and Confessor)

Giles (Aedigius) was born in Athens in the middle of the seventh century to an illustrious family. From his childhood Giles applied himself applied himself so earnestly to the study of divine things and to works of charity, that he seemed to care for nothing else. On the death of his parents he he distributed his whole fortune among the poor, even stripping himself of his own garment in order to clothe a poor sick man, who was cured as soon as he put it on. Many other miracles soon made his name so famous, that for fear of renown he fled to Saint Caesarius at Arles. After two years Giles departed from there and retired into a desert where he lived a life of holiness, his only food being the roots of herbs and the milk of a hind who came to him at fixed times. One day the hind being pursued by the royal huntsmen took refuge in his cave. Upon this discovery of the holy man, the king of France begged Giles to allow a monastery to be built on the site of the cave. At the king’s desire he was obliged, against his will, to undertake the government of this monastery. After having for several years discharged that office with much piety and prudence he passed away to Heaven.

Dom Prosper Guéranger:

“A simple and upright man, and fearing God, and avoiding evil” (Job xiv. 14): such is the description of the just man in the lessons of the night Office for the time, and it is the portrait of the holy monk whom the Church offers us today for our admiration, our imitation, and our devotion. Fleeing from men in order to find God, he quitted his native land where his rank, and still more his virtues, prevented him from being unknown. He wandered from the coasts of Greece to the borders of the Rhone, and stopped at length in the forests of Septimania, where he seemed to have found his desired solitude. There for three years he dwelt in a cave hidden among the brambles, spending his time in giving thanks to God and praying for the salvation of the people. He lived on herbs and water until our Lord sent him a hind to nourish him with her milk. But his little friend was soon to betray him. One day, hard pressed by the hounds, she fled in terror to the saint, followed by the royal huntsmen. Safe with her protector her fears were calmed, but an arrow aimed at her pierced Saint Giles’s hand, which was never afterwards healed, for he refused to have it dressed, in order that he might hear the pain of it for the rest of his life.

But a greater trial awaited him: his retreat having been thus discovered, a monastery soon rose upon the spot, and he was forced to become its abbot. Moreover he worked so many miracles that crowds came to see him. Farewell to the silence and oblivion of his beloved forest! After the death of the servant of God, the place became more and more frequented. From north and east and south pilgrims poured in, to offer up their prayers and fulfil their vows at the tomb of one who soon became known as one of the most helpful saints in Heaven.

[Saint Giles is the only confessor in the group of fourteen saints known as helpers, whose names are given in ancient missals in the following order: George, Blase, Erasmus, Pantaleon, Vitus, Christopher, Giles, Achatus or Acathius, Denis, Cyriacus, Eustace, Catherine, Margaret, and Barbara. He was even reckoned among the five privileged saints, viz . Denis, George, Christopher, Blase, and Giles, honoured in a more special manner in certain places.]

Among the crowds came Pontiffs [Urban II, who consecrated the altar of the basilica where the holy body rested, Gelasius II, Callistus II, Innocent II. Clement IV was born at Saint Giles’s. Julius II had held the abbey in commendam] and kings [Boleslas III of Poland, and Saint Louis of France.] But the most numerous classes of visitors to the holy relics were soldiers and little children, the former equipped for the crusades, the latter borne in their mothers’ arms; all confiding in the humble, gentle monk who, at the risk of his life, calmed the terror of the poor little hind; all imploring his assistance against the fear which even the bravest may feel in the hour of battle, or the fright that disturbs the little one in his cradle. Saint Giles’s ranked as one of the three great pilgrimages of the west; the other two being Rome and Compostello.

Over the relics of the saint was raised a colossal church, which has been described as “the most perfect type of the Byzantine style when at the height of its splendour.” Around it a town of 30,000 households has sprung up, where formerly there was but a desert. The most illustrious of the powerful Counts of Toulouse gave the preference over his other titles to the one he held from this noble city; he would be known to posterity as Raymund of Saint Giles. A hundred years later, Raymund VI did penance at the threshold of the celebrated basilica for his connivance with heresy. Our saint, who had just given hospitality to Peter of Castelnau for his last resting-place, opened his gates for the reconciliation of the martyr’s presumed murderer.

We should never end, were we to enumerate the churches, parishes, abbeys, and altars consecrated to Saint Giles, in all parts of Christendom, which are so many sources of grace, and new centres for pilgrimages. Spain, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Bavaria, Poland, rival France in this respect. England is second to no country in the world. She has 146 sanctuaries dedicated to the pious monk, and even the established church continues to honour him.

“Go to my servant... and offer for yourselves a holocaust: and my servant... shall pray for you: his face I will accept, that folly be not imputed to you” (Job lxii. 8). This word is unceasingly fulfilled, O blessed Giles, in the innumerable sanctuaries where you are honoured. Make use of your prerogatives for our benefit. Hear our prayers for the glory of Him who has crowned your humility. In return for the beautiful peace you ever preserved in your soul, you now have power over the countless troubles which disturb our miserable existence, from the cradle even to the tomb. You aid mothers to drive away from their babes the nightly phantoms raised by the enemy of the innocents. You preserve the little ones from the terrible maladies to which childhood is liable. You watch over the youth, to secure his good morals, and give him the fear of God which will make him a courageous and upright man. You make him brave and calm in the midst of dangers, whether in thunderstorms or on the field of battle. Above all, you preserve your client from the most cowardly of all fears, that of human respect; and from the saddest kind of shame, that which would withhold him from acknowledging his sins in the sacred tribunal of Penance. The cares and disappointments of middle life do not disturb the peace of him who trusts in you. Old age has no anxious future for him. He falls into his last sleep, in the bosom of God, as in infancy he fell asleep in his mother’s arms. Deign to accept us among your devout clients, and disappoint us not in our expectations.

Also on this day according to the ROMAN MARTYROLOGY:

At Benevento, twelve saintly brothers, martyrs.

In Palestine, the Saints Josue and Gedeon.

At Jerusalem, blessed Anna, prophetess, whose sanctity is revealed in the Gospel.

At Capua, on the Via Aquaria, St. Priscus, martyr, who was one of the ancient disciples of Christ.

At Rheims in France, St. Sixtus, a disciple of the blessed Apostle St. Peter, who was consecrated by him the first bishop of that city and received the crown of martyrdom under Nero.

At Todi in Umbria, St. Terentian, bishop and martyr. Under the emperor Hadrian, he was racked, and scourged with whips set with metal by order of the proconsul Laetian, and finally, having his tongue cut out, he ended his martyrdom by undergoing capital punishment.

At Heraclea, St. Ammon, deacon, and forty holy virgins who he instructed in the faith and led with him to the glory of martyrdom under the tyrant Licinius.

In Spain, the holy martyrs Vincent and Laetus.

At Piombino in Tuscany, St. Regulus, martyr, who went there from Africa and consummated his martyrdom under Totila.

At Sens, St. Lupus, bishop and confessor, of whom it is related, that on a certain day, while he stood at the holy altar in presence of the clergy, a gem fell from heaven into the consecrated chalice he was using.

At Capua, St. Priscus, bishop. He was one of those priests who were subjected to various trials for the Catholic faith during the persecution of the Vandals. Being put in an old ship on the coast of Africa, they reached the shores of Campania, and separating, they were placed at the head of various churches, and thus greatly extended the Christian religion. The companions of Priscus were Castrensis, Tammarus, Rosius, Heraclius, Secundinus, Adjutor, Mark, Augustus, Elpidius, Canion and Vindonius.

At Aquino, St. Constantius, a bishop renowned for the gift of prophecy and many virtues.

At Le Mans, St. Victorius, bishop.

In Baden, in the diocese of Constance, St. Verena, virgin.

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

Thanks be to God.

SEPTEMBER – THE MONTH OF THE SEVEN SORROWS OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY

The Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary is a devotion which dates back to the thirteenth century when the first altar to the Mater Dolorosa (Sorrowful Mother) was erected in a monastery in Germany. In 1233 the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to seven young men of noble rank of Florence and asked them to withdraw from the world and form a new religious order devoted particularly to her Seven Sorrows. The “Religious Servants of the Holy Virgin,” also known as the Servite Order, adopted the Rule of Saint Augustine, and Saint Juliana Falconieri founded the Third Order for women in 1306.

Devotion to the Seven Sorrows of Mary should be practised especially by those who wish to rid themselves of sinful habits. This devotion:

• nourishes the spirit of compunction;
  
• affords great consolation;
  
• strengthens confidence in God's mercy;
  
• draws down the special protection of the Blessed Mother in the hour of temptation;
  
• preserves the converted sinner from relapsing into sin.

According to Saint Bridget of Sweden, the Blessed Virgin Mary revealed to her that she will grant those who daily honour her by saying seven Hail Marys while meditating on her tears and sorrows the following seven graces:

1. I will grant peace to their families.
   
2. They will be enlightened about the divine mysteries.
   
3. I will console them in their pains and I will accompany them in their work.
   
4. I will give them as much as they ask for as long as it does not oppose the adorable will of my divine Son or the sanctification of their souls.
   
5. I will defend them in their spiritual battles with the infernal enemy and I will protect them at every instant of their lives.
   
6. I will visibly help them at the moment of their death - they will see the face of their mother.
   
7. I have obtained this grace form my divine Son, that those who propagate this devotion to my tears and sorrows will be taken directly from this earthly life to eternal happiness, since all their sins will be forgiven and my Son will be their eternal consolation and joy.

And, according to Saint Alphonsus Ligouri, Our Lord revealed to Saint Elizabeth of Hungary that He will grant those who are devoted to the Seven Sorrows of His Blessed Mother the following four graces:

1. That those who invoke the divine Mother by her sorrows, before death will merit to obtain true repentance of all their sins.
   
2. That He will protect such in their tribulations, especially at the hour of death.
   
3. That He will impress on them the memory of His Passion, and that they will have their reward for it in Heaven.
   
4. That He will commit such devout servants to the hands of Mary, that she may dispose of them according to her pleasure, and obtain for them all the graces she desires.
   

31 AUGUST – SAINT RAYMUND NONNATUS (Bishop and Confessor)

Raymund, surnamed Nonnatus on account of his having been brought into the world in an unusual manner after the death of his mother, was of a pious and noble family of Portelli in Catalonia. Raymund was born in about 1200 AD. From his very infancy he showed signs of his future holiness for, despising childish amusements and the attractions of the world, he applied himself to the practice of piety so that all wondered at his virtue, which far surpassed his age. As he grew older he began his studies, but after a short time he returned at his father’s command to live in the country. He frequently visited the chapel of Saint Nicholas near Portelli to venerate in it a holy image of the Mother of God, which is still much honoured by the faithful. There he would pour out his prayers, begging God’s holy Mother to adopt him for her son and to deign to teach him the way of salvation and the science of the saints.

The most benign Virgin heard his prayer and gave him to understand that it would greatly please her if he entered the religious Order lately founded by her inspiration, under the name of the Order of ‘Ransom, or of Mercy for the redemption of captives.’ Upon this Raymund at once set out for Barcelona, there to embrace that institute so full of brotherly charity. Thus enrolled in the army of holy religion, he persevered in perpetual virginity, which he had already consecrated to the blessed Virgin. He excelled also in every other virtue, most especially in charity towards those Christians who were living in misery as slaves of the pagans. He was sent to Africa to redeem them, and freed many from slavery. But when he had exhausted his money, rather than abandon others who were in danger of losing their faith, he gave himself up to the barbarians as a pledge for their ransom. Burning with a most ardent desire for the salvation of souls, be converted several Muslims to Christ by his preaching. On this account he was thrown into a close prison, and after many tortures his lips were pierced through and fastened together with an iron padlock, which cruel martyrdom he endured for a long time.

This and his other noble deeds spread the fame of his sanctity far and near, so that Gregory IX determined to enrol him in the august college of the cardinals of the holy Roman Church. When raised to that dignity the man of God shrank from all pomp and clung always to religious humility. On his way to Rome, as soon as he reached Cardona, he was attacked by his last illness, and earnestly begged to be strengthened by the Sacraments of the Church. As his illness grew worse and the priest delayed to come, angels appeared, clothed in the religious habit of his Order, and refreshed him with the saving Viaticum. Having received It he gave thanks to God, and passed to our Lord on the last Sunday of August in 1240. Contentions arose concerning the place where he should be buried. His coffin was therefore placed upon a blind mule and by the will of God it was taken to the chapel of Saint Nicholas, that it might be buried in that place where he had first begun a more perfect life. A convent of his Order was built on the spot, and there famous for many signs and miracles he is honoured by the concourse of all the faithful of Catalonia, who come there to fulfil their vows.

Dom Prosper Gueranger:

August closes as it began, with a feast of deliverance, as though that were the divine seal set by eternal Wisdom upon this month — the mouth when holy Church makes the works and ways of divine Wisdom the special object of her contemplation.

Upon the fall of our first parents and their expulsion from Paradise, the Word and Wisdom of God, that is, the second Person of the blessed Trinity, began the great work of our deliverance —that magnificent work of human redemption which, by an all-gracious, eternal decree of the three divine Persons, was to be wrought out by the Son of God in our flesh. And as that blessed Saviour, in His infinite wisdom, made spontaneous choice of sorrows, of sufferings, and of death on a cross, as the best means of our redemption, so has He always allotted to His best loved friends, the kind of life which He had deliberately chosen for Himself, that is, the way of the cross. And the nearest and dearest to Him were those who were predestined, like His blessed Mother, the Mater Dolorosa, to have the honour of being most like Himself, the Man of sorrows. Hence the toils and trials of the greatest saints. Hence the great deliverances wrought by them, and their heroic victories over the world and over the spirits of wickedness in the high places.

On the feasts of Saints Raymund of Pegnafort and Peter Nolasco we saw something of the origin of the illustrious Order to which Raymund Nonnatus added such glory. Soon the august foundress herself, our Lady of Mercy, will come in person to receive the expression of the world’s gratitude for so many benefits.

TO what a length, O illustrious saint, did you follow the counsel of the wise man! ‘The bands of wisdom,’ says he, ‘are a healthful binding’ (Ecclesiasticus vi. 31). And, not satisfied with putting ‘your feet into her fetters and your neck into her chains,’ (Ecclesiasticus vi. 25), in the joy of you love you offered your lips to the dreadful padlock, not mentioned by the son of Sirach. But what a reward is yours now that this Wisdom of the Father, whose twofold precept of charity you so fully carried out, inebriates you with the torrent of eternal delights, adorning your brow with the glory and grace which radiate from her own beauty! We would fain be forever with you near that throne of light. Teach us, then, how to walk, in this world, by the beautiful ways and peaceable paths of Wisdom. Deliver our souls, if they be still captive in sin. Break the chains of our self-love, and give us instead those blessed bands of Wisdom which are humility, abnegation, self-forgetfulness, love of our brethren for God’s sake, and love of God for His own sake.

Also on this day according to the ROMAN MARTYROLOGY:

At Treves, the birthday of St. Paulimis, a bishop, who was exiled for the Catholic faith by the Arian emperor Constantius in the time of the Arian persecution. By having to change the place of his exile which was beyond the limits of Christendom, he became wearied unto death, and finally, dying in Phrygia, received a crown from the Lord for his blessed martyrdom.

Also the holy martyrs Robustian and Mark.

At Transaquae, among the Marsi near lake Celano, the birthday of the holy martyrs Cresidius, priest, and his companions, who were crowned with martyrdom in the persecution of Maximinus.

At Caesarea in Cappadocia, the Saints Theodotus, Rufina and Ammia. The first two were the parents of the martyr St. Mamas, who was born in prison, and who Ammia brought up.

At Athens, St. Aristides, most celebrated for his faith and wisdom, who presented to the emperor Hadrian a treatise on the Christian religion containing the exposition of our doctrine. In the presence of the emperor he also delivered a discourse in which he clearly demonstrated that Jesus Christ is the only God.

At Auxerre, St. Optatus, bishop and confessor.

In England, St. Aidan, bishop of Lindisfarne. When St. Cuthbert, then a shepherd, saw his soul going up to heaven, he left his sheep and became a monk.

At Nusco, St. Amatus, bishop.

On Mount Senario near Florence, blessed Bonajuncta, confessor, one of the seven founders of the Order of the Servites of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who gave up his soul into the hands of the Lord while discoursing to his brethren on the Passion of Our Saviour.

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

Thanks be to God.

30 AUGUST – SAINT ROSE OF LIMA (Virgin)

The patron saint of the Americas was born at Lima in Peru in 1586. From her very cradle she gave clear signs of her future holiness. Her baby face appeared one day changed in a wonderful way into the image of a rose, and from this circumstance she was called Rose. Later on the Virgin Mother of God gave her also her own name, bidding her to be called thenceforward Rose of Saint Mary. At five years of age she made a vow of perpetual virginity, and when she grew older, fearing her parents would compel her to marry she secretly cut off her hair which was very beautiful. Her fasts exceeded the strength of human nature. She would pass whole Lents without eating bread, living on five grains of a citron a day. She took the habit of the third Order of Saint Dominic and after that redoubled her austerities. Her long and rough hair-shirt was armed with steel points, and day and night she wore under her veil a crown studded inside with sharp nails. Following the arduous example of Saint Catherine of Siena, she wound an iron chain three times round her waist and made herself a bed of the knotty trunks of trees, filling up the vacant space between them with potsherds.

Rose built herself a narrow little cell in a distant corner of the garden, and there devoted herself to the contemplation of heavenly things, subduing her feeble body by iron disciplines, fasting and watching. Thus she was strong in spirit, and continually overcame the devils, spurning and dispelling their deceits. Though she suffered greatly from severe illnesses, from the insults offered her by her family and from unkind tongues, yet she would say that she was not treated as badly as she deserved. For fifteenth years she suffered for several hours a day a terrible desolation and dryness of spirit, but she bore this suffering, worse than death itself, with undaunted courage. After that period she was given an abundance of heavenly delights, she was honoured with visions, and felt her heart melting with seraphic love. Her Angel-Guardian, Saint Catherine of Siena and our Lady used often to appear to her with wonderful familiarity. She was privileged to bear these words from our Lord: “Rose of my heart, be my bride.” Rose died at the age of 31 years in 1617. She was beatified by Pope Clement IX, in 1667 and canonised by Pope Clement X in 1671.

Dom Prosper Guéranger:

The fragrance of holiness is wafted today across the dark ocean, renewing the youth of the Old World and winning for the New the good will of Heaven and Earth.

A century before the birth of Saint Rose, Spain, having cast out the Crescent from her own territory, received as a reward the mission of planting the Cross on the distant shores of America. Neither heroes nor apostles were wanting in the Catholic kingdom for the great work. But there was also, unhappily, no lack of adventurers who in their thirst for gold became the scourge of the poor Indians instead of leading them to the true God. The speedy decadence of the illustrious nation that had triumphed over the Moors was soon to prove how far a people, prevented with the greatest blessings, may yet be answerable for crimes committed by Its individual representatives. It is well known how the empire of the Incas in Peru came to an end. In spite of the indignant protestations of the missionaries: in spite of orders received from the mother country: in a few years, Pizarro and his companions had exterminated one third of the inhabitants of these flourishing regions. Another third perished miserably under a slavery worse than death. The rest fled to the mountains, carrying with them a hatred of the invaders, and too often of the Gospel as well, which in their eyes was responsible for atrocities committed by Christians. Avarice opened the door to all vices in the souls of the conquerors without, however, destroying their lively faith. Lima, founded at the foot of the Cordilleras as metropolis of the subjugated provinces, seemed as if built upon the triple concupiscence. Before the close of the century, a new Jonas, Saint Francis Solano, .came to threaten this new Niniveh with the anger of God.

But mercy had already been beforehand with wrath. “Justice and peace had met” (Psalm lxxxiv. 11) in the soul of a child who was ready, in her insatiable love, to suffer every expiation. Here we should like to pause and contemplate the virgin of Peru, in her self-forgetful heroism, in her pure and candid gracefulness: Rose, who was all sweetness to those who approached her, and who kept to herself the secret of the thorns without which no rose can grow on Earth. This child of predilection was prevented from her infancy with miraculous gifts and favours. The flowers recognised her as their queen, and at her desire they would blossom out of season. At her invitation the plants joyfully waved their leaves, the trees bent down their branches, all nature exulted. Even the insects formed themselves into choirs. The birds vied with her in celebrating the praises of their common Maker. She herself, playing upon the names of her parents, Gaspard Flores and Maria Oliva, would sing: “O my Jesus, how beautiful you are among the olives and the flowers, and you do not disdain your Rose!”

Eternal Wisdom has from the beginning delighted to play in the world (Proverbs viii. 30, 31). Clement X relates, in the Bull of Canonization, how one day when Rose was very ill, the infant Jesus appeared and deigned to play with her, teaching her, in a manner suited to her tender age, the value and the advantages of suffering. He then left her full of joy, and endowed with a life-long love of the cross. Holy Church will tell us, in the Legend, how far the Saint carried out, in her rigorous penance, the lesson thus divinely taught. In the superhuman agonies of her last illness, when some one exhorted her to courage, she replied: “All I ask of my Spouse is that He will not cease to bum me with the most scorching heat till I become a ripe fruit that He will deign to cull from this Earth for His heavenly table.” To those who were astonished at her confidence and her assurance of going straight to Heaven, she gave this answer which well expresses her character: “I have a Spouse who can do all that is greatest, and who possesses all that is rarest, and am I to expect only little things from Him?” And her confidence was rewarded. She was but thirty-one years of age when, at midnight on the feast of St. Bartholomew in 1617, she heard the cry: “Behold the Bridegroom comes!”

In Lima, in all Peru, and indeed throughout America, prodigies of conversion and miracles signalised the death of the humble virgin, hitherto so little known. “It has been juridically proved,” said the Sovereign Pontiff, “that since the discovery of Peru no missionary has been known to obtain so universal a movement of repentance.” Five years later, for the further sanctification of Lima, there was established in its midst the monastery of Saint Catherine of Siena, also called Rose’s monastery because she was in the eyes of God its true foundress and mother. Her prayers had obtained its erection, which she had also predicted. She had designed the plan, pointed out the future religious, and named the first superior, whom she one day prophetically endowed with her own spirit in a mysterious embrace.

O Saint Rose, teach us to let ourselves be prevented, like you, by the dew of Heaven. Show us how to respond to the advances of the divine sculptor who one day allowed you to see Him making over to His loved ones the different virtues in the form of blocks of choice marble, which He expects them to polish with their tears, and to fashion with the chisel of penance. Above all, fill us with love and confidence. All that the material sun accomplishes in the vast universe, causing the flowers to bloom, ripening the fruits, forming pearls in the depth of the ocean, and precious stones in the heart of the mountains: all this, you said, your divine Spouse effected in the boundless capacity of your soul, causing it to bring forth every variety of riches, beauty and joy, warmth and life. May we profit, as you did, of the coming of the Sun of Justice into our hearts in the Sacrament of union. May we lay open our whole being to the influence of his blessed light and may we become, in every place, the good odour of Christ.

Also on this day according to the ROMAN MARTYROLOGY:

At Rome, on the Via Ostiensis, the martyrdom of the blessed priest Felix under the emperors Diocletian and Maximian in 304 AD. After being racked he was sentenced to death, and as he was being led to his execution he was met by a stranger, who was so moved by the sight that he cried out, “I also confess the same law as this man. I confess the same Jesus Christ and I am ready to lay down my life in witness of these truths.” The stranger was seized, tried and sentenced to death. His name was never known, so he was called Adauctus because he had joined himself to Felix to share his crown of martyrdom.

Also at Rome, St. Gaudentia, virgin and martyr, with three others.

In the same city, St. Pammachius, a priest distinguished for learning and holiness.

At Colonia Suffetulana in Africa, sixty blessed martyrs who were murdered by furious Gentiles.

At Adrumetum in Africa, the Saints Boniface and Thecla, who were the parents of twelve blessed sons, martyrs.

At Thessalonica, St. Fantinus, confessor, who suffered much from the Saracens, and was driven from his monastery in which he had lived in great abstinence. After having brought many to the way of salvation he rested at last at an advanced age.

In the diocese of Meaux, St. Fiacre, confessor.

At Trevi, St. Peter, confessor, who was distinguished for many virtues and miracles. He is honoured in that place, from which he departed for heaven.

At Bologna, St. Bononius, abbot.

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

Thanks be to God.

30 AUGUST – FOURTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Dom Prosper Guéranger:

In the Western Church this Sunday is called that of the Two Masters because of the Gospel which is read upon it. The Greeks give it the name of the Sunday of the Invited to the Marriage-feast or the Fourteenth of Saint Matthew, unless the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (14 September) happen to fall during the ensuing week. In this latter case, this and the following Sundays are called of the Exaltation, and take for their Gospels, the first from Saint John, the second from Saint Mark. After this follow the Sundays called of Saint Luke, which go on till Lent, in the manner already described for Saint Matthew.

Epistle – Galatians v. 16‒24

Brethren, walk in the spirit, and you will not fulfil the lusts of the flesh: for the flesh lusts against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh; for these are contrary one to another; so that you do not the things that you would. But if you are led by the spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are manifest; which are, fornication, uncleanness, immodesty, luxury, idolatry, witchcrafts, enmities, contentions, emulations, wraths, quarrels, dissensions, sects, envies, murders drunkenness, revellings, and such like; of the which I foretell you, as I have foretold to you, that they who do such things will not obtain the Kingdom of God! But the fruit of the spirit is charity, joy, peace, patience, benignity, goodness, longanimity, mildness, faith, modesty, continency, chastity. Against such there is no law. And they that are Christ’s have crucified their flesh with the vices and concupiscences.

Thanks be to God.

Dom Prosper Guéranger:

The Bride who came from the top of Sanir and Hermon that she might be crowned (Canticles iv. 8) knows not the servitude of Sinai (Galatians iv. 24‒26). Still less is she under the slavery of the senses. On the mountain, where her tent is fixed forever (Isaias ii. 2), her Spouse has broken the fetters of the Jewish law, and that more galling chain which tied all people down — the web of sin that covered all nations of the Earth (Isaias xxv. 7). She, the Bride, is queen — her sons are kings (1 Peter ii. 9), the milk on which she feeds them (Isaias lxvi. 8‒12) infuses liberty within them (Galatians iv. 31). Filled with the Holy Spirit, who is their glory and their strength (Romans viii. 14, 26), they they have the Lord of Hosts looking on them as they bravely fight battles such as Princes should engage in (Ephesians iv. 8; vi. 12). Satan, too, has beheld their glorious struggles, and his kingdom has been shaken to its foundations (John xii. 31). Two cities now divide the world between them (St. Augstine, City of God) and the Holy City, made up of vanquishers over the devil, the world, and the flesh, is full of admiration and joy at seeing that the noblest of the nations flock to her (Isaias lx. 5). The law which reigns supreme within her walls is love, for the Holy Spirit who rules her happy citizens takes them far beyond the injunctions or prohibitions of any law. Together with Charity, there spring up Joy, Peace, and those other Fruits, here enumerated by the Apostle. They grow spontaneously from a soil which is saturated with the glad waters (Psalm lxiv. 11) of a Stream which is no other than the Sanctifying Spirit who inundates the City of God (Psalm xlv. 5). We are not astonished at this new Sion being loved by the Lord above all the tabernacles of Jacob (Psalm lxxxvi. 2), beautiful as those once were (Numbers xxiv. 5). Now that the Blessing has taken on Earth the place once held by the Law, the Servants of God have been turned into Children, Sons and Daughters. Even while living in the flesh, they bear evidence of their heavenly origin by going on from virtue to virtue. Though sojourning in this vale of tears, they are ever on the ascent, approaching gradually nearer to the high summits of holiness: they reflect in their lives the perfection of their heavenly Father (Matthew v. 48) who, surrounded as He thus is in Sion by this noble family, is seen to be in all truth the God of gods (Psalm lxxxiii. 6‒8).

Flesh and blood have had no share in their divine birth (John i. 12), flesh and blood have no hand in their regenerated life (1 Corinthians xv. 50). Their first birth being in the flesh, they were flesh and did the works of death and ignominy mentioned in the Epistle, showing at every turn that they were from slime of earth (Genesis ii. 7), but born of the Spirit they are spirit (John iii. 6) and do the works of the Spirit in spite of the flesh which is always part of their being (2 Corinthians x. 3). For, by giving them of His own life, the Spirit has emancipated them by the power of love from the tyranny of sin (Romans viii. 2) which held dominion over their members (Romans vii. 23), and having been grafted on Christ, they bring forth fruit to God (Romans vii. 4).

Man, therefore, who was once a slave to concupiscence, has regained on the cross of Christ that equilibrium of his existence (Romans viii. 3) which is true liberty. The supremacy which the soul had forfeited in punishment for her revolt against God (Romans i. 28) has been restored to her by the laver of the water of baptism, and now that she is once more queen, it is but just that she chastise the slave who so long lorded it over her, his rightful sovereign. Man owes nothing to the flesh (Romans viii. 12), especially after the miseries it has brought on him: but further than this, God too has been insulted by the sensual abominations committed in His his sacred presence, and He too demands atonement. For this purpose He mercifully takes man, now that he is enfranchised, and confides to him the task of sharing with His divine Majesty, in taking revenge on their common enemy and usurper. Then, again, this mortifying the flesh and keeping it in subjection is a necessary means for retaining the good position already obtained. It is true, that the rebel has been made incapable of damaging those who are in Christ Jesus, and who walk not according to the flesh and its vile suggestions (Romans viii. 1), but it is equally true that the rebel is rebel still, and is ever watching opportunities for assailing the spirit. If there be exceptions, they are exceedingly rare. The rule of the flesh is to attack the spirit all through life, and try to make it yield. If one were an Antony in the desert, the flesh would be fierce in its assaults, even there. If the Saint were a Paul, just fresh from the third heaven of his sublime revelations, the flesh would have impudence enough to buffet even him (2 Corinthians xii. 7). So that, had we no past sins to atone for, the commonest prudence would urge us to take severe measures of precaution against an enemy who is so fearfully untiring in his hatred of us and, what is worse, lives always in our own home. That Saint Paul, of whom we were just speaking, says of himself: “I chastise my body, and bring it into subjection, lest, perhaps I should become reprobate!” (1 Corinthians ix. 27).

Penance and Mortification differ in this: that Penance is a debt of justice incumbent on the sinner. Mortification is a duty commanded by prudence, which duty becomes that of every Christian who is not foolish enough to pretend to be out of the reach of concupiscence. Is there any one living who could honestly say that he has fully acquitted himself of these two duties: that he has satisfied the claims of God’s justice? and that he has stifled every germ of his evil passions? All spiritual masters, without exception, teach that no man who is desirous either for perfection or salvation should limit himself to the rules of simple Temperance, that cardinal virtue which forbids excess in pleasures, be they of one kind or another. This, they tell us, is not enough, and that the Christian, taking up another virtue, namely Fortitude, must from time to time refuse himself even lawful gratifications; must impose privations on himself which are not otherwise of obligation; must even inflict punishment on himself in the manner and measure permitted him by a discreet director. Amid the thousands of holy writers who treat on this point of asceticism, let us listen to the amiable and gentle Saint Francis of Sales: “If,” says he in his Introduction to a Devout Life, “If you can bear fasting, you would do well to fast on certain days, beyond those fasts which the Church commands us to observe... even when one does not fast much, yet does the enemy fear us all the more when he knows that we know how to impose a fast on ourselves. Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays were the days on which the Christians of former times most practised abstinence. Therefore, choose out of these for your fasts as far as your devotion and the discretion of your director will counsel you to do... The discipline, when taken with moderation, possesses a marvellous power for awakening the desire for devotion. The hair-shirt is efficacious in reducing the body to subjection... on days which are especially devoted to penance, one may wear it, the advice of a discreet Confessor having been previously taken.” Thus speaks the learned Doctor of the Church, the saintly Bishop of Geneva, whose sweet prudence is almost proverbial. And they to whom he addresses these instructions are persons living in the world. In the world, quite as much as in the cloister, the Christian Life, if seriously taken up, imperatively requires this incessant war of the spirit against the flesh. Let that war cease, and the flesh speedily usurps the sway and reduces the soul to a state of torpor by either seizing her very first attempts at virtue and chilling them into apathy, or by plunging her at a single throw deep into the filth of sin.

Neither is it to be feared that affability in the Christian’s social intercourse will be in any way impaired by this energy of self-mortification. That virtue which is based on such forgetfulness of oneself as to make him love discomfort and suffering for God’s sake does not render such a man one whitless pleasing in company, nor rob the friendly circle he frequents of one single charm. But will it not interfere, somewhat, with an article which the world is very jealous about? No: when Dress is what Christian reserve would have it be — in other and plainer words, when it is the love of Jesus that regulates the arrangements — there is no toilet where the jewels of penance may not find their place, without in the least intruding with those of the world. The day of judgement will give a strange lesson to those many good-for-nothing and cowardly Christians who feel sure that every one of their acquaintance is as fond of easy-going softness as they themselves are! Then will be revealed to them the pious schemes of penance which Christian love of the Cross suggested as means for crucifying their flesh even amid pleasures, and to those very persons who were the most admired in the worldling’s earthly paradise of gay saloons.

And ought it not to be thus? Ought not the Cross to be most dear to men? Yes, unless we hold that Christianity and divine love have entirely disappeared from this world. How is it possible to love Jesus, the Man of sorrows (Isaias liii. 3) and not love His sufferings? Can we say that we are walking in His footsteps if we are not on the road to Calvary? “If any man will come after me,” says this Jesus, “let him deny himself and take up his cross, and follow me!” (Matthew xvi. 24). And the Church, who is one with her divine Spouse — the Church who completes Him in all things (Ephesians i. 23) and therefore continues through all ages His life of expiation and atonement, puts on her children the sublime task which the Apostle thus expresses: “I fill up those things that are wanting of the sufferings of Christ by suffering in my flesh for His body, which is the Church” (Colossians i. 24).

Sublime task indeed! Filial, as far as the Church is concerned, but divine also, and deifying if we consider the union it produces between the Word and the Soul: He, the Word, gives to the soul what He has not given to the Angels, that is, He invites her to a share of that Chalice which the Eternal Father reserved to Jesus’ sacred Humanity (John xviii. 11), Here we have the intimacy of the Bride: the one same Cup for the Two, and it unites their two lives into one. It is a Cup of sorrow’s holy inebriation. They both drink it with avidity, and that avidity gives such vehemence to their union that the creature, at times, leaves her ecstasy all stigmatised in soul, yea, it may be in her body too, with the Wounds of her Crucified Lord. But whether our Lord communicates or not, either invisibly or visibly, the stigmata of His love to the soul that is devoted to Him, there is always, under one form or other, the royal seal which gives the surest sign of authenticity to the contract of divine union here below. That seal is suffering. Many who, on hearing or reading the favours gratuitously granted to certain saintly souls, are excited to a feeling of holy envy, would shrink back with dismay if they were told of the trials they had to go through before gaining such mystic ascensions. Even when the trials of purification, (of which we were speaking on a former occasion) are all over, the place of meeting is invariably that which the inspired Canticle calls the Mount of myrrh (Canticles iv. 6), which is but another name for suffering. Myrrh is the first fragrant herb culled by the divine Word in the mystic garden — nay, it is the only one He expressly mentions (Canticles v. 1). Myrrh distils from the Bride’s hands, and her fingers are full of it (Canticles v. 5). Her Spouse is the bouquet she clasps to her heart, but that bouquet is one of Myrrh (Canticles i. 12) and His lips are as lilies dropping choice Myrrh (Canticles v. 13).

Of course, we are too miserable ever to aspire to be raised up by the Holy Spirit to those heights of the mystic life where divine union produces such marvellous results as those we have already mentioned, but let us remember that neither the intensity nor the merit of love, no, not even the reality of effective Union, depend on those exterior manifestations. It should suffice to make us love, and even go in quest of, suffering, to remember how faith teaches us, that it was life-long with Him who wishes and infinitely deserves to be the one object of our thoughts and affections. We are members of a Head who was crowned with thorns. Can we pretend to have nothing but pleasures and flowers? Let us not forget that all the Saints must, when in Heaven, be likenesses of the new Adam (1 Corinthians xv. 45‒49), and that the Eternal Father admits no one into His House who is not conformable to the image of His Son (Romans viii. 29, 30).

Gospel – Matthew vi. 24‒33

At that time, Jesus said to His disciples, “No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one, and love the other, or he will sustain the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and Mammon. Therefore I, say to you, be not solicitous for your life, what you will eat, nor for your body, what you will put on. Is not the life more than the meat, and the body more, than the raiment? Behold the birds of the air; for they neither sow, nor do they reap, nor gather into barns, and your heavenly Father feeds them. Are not you of much more, value than they? And which of you, by taking thought can add to his stature one cubit? And for raiment, why are you solicitous? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they labour not, neither do they spin; but I say to you, that not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as one of these. Now, if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is today and tomorrow, is cast into the oven, how much more you, O you of little faith! Be not solicitous, therefore, saying, What shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or with what shall we be clothed? For after all these things do the heathens seek. For your Father knows that you have need of all these things. Seek therefore first the Kingdom of God, and His justice, and all these things will be added to you.”

Praise be to you, O Christ.

Dom Prosper Guéranger:

The supernatural life can never be healthy in men’s souls unless it triumphs over the three enemies which Saint John calls concupiscence of the flesh, concupiscence of the eyes, and the pride of life (1 John ii. 16). As to the first of these, our Epistle has been instructing us on the obstacle it raises against the action of the Holy Spirit, and on the means we are to adopt for surmounting it. Pride of life is overcome by Humility on which the Church has several times spoken to us during the previous Sundays. The Gospel, which has just been read to us, is the condemnation of the concupiscence of the eyes, that is, attachment to the goods of this world which of themselves are but goods in name and appearance.

No man, says our Lord, can serve two masters. And these two Masters are God and Mammon. Mammon means riches. Riches are not of their own nature bad. When lawfully acquired and used agreeably to the designs of God, riches help the possessor to gain true goods for his soul. He stores up for himself, in the kingdom of his eternal home, treasures which neither thieves nor rust can reach (Matthew vi. 19, 20). Ever since the Incarnation in which the divine Word espoused Poverty to Himself, it is the Poor that are Heaven’s nobility, and yet the mission of the rich man is a grand one. He is permitted to be rich in order that he may be God’s minister to make all the several portions of material creation turn to their Creator’s glory. He graciously vouchsafes to entrust into his hands the feeding and supporting the dearest of His children, that is, the Poor, that is, the indigent and suffering members of His Christ. He calls him to uphold the interests of his Church and be the promoter of works connected with the salvation of men. He confides to him the keeping up the beauty of his temples. Happy that man, and worthy of all praise, who thus directly brings back to the glory of their maker the fruits of the Earth and the precious metals she yields from her bosom! Let not such a man fear: it is not of him that Jesus speaks those anathemas uttered so frequently by Him against the rich ones of this world. He has but one Master, the Father who is in Heaven, whose steward he humbly and gladly acknowledges himself to be. Mammon does not domineer over him. On the contrary, he makes her his servant and obliges her to minister to his zeal in all good works. The solicitude he takes in spending his wealth in acts of justice and charity is not that which our Gospel here blames, for in all such solicitude he is but following our Lord’s precept of seeking first the kingdom of God, and the riches which pass through his hands in the furtherance of good works do not distract his thoughts from that Heaven where his heart is, because his true treasure is there (Matthew vi. 21).

It is quite otherwise when riches, instead of being regarded as a simple means, become the very end of a man’s existence, and that to such an extent as to make him neglect and sometimes forget his last end. “The ways of every covetous man,” says the Scripture, “destroy the souls of the possessors” (Proverbs i. 19). The Apostle explains this by saying that the love of money drives a man into temptation and the snares of the devil by the countless unprofitable and hurtful desires it excites within him. It drowns men in destruction and perdition, making them even barter away their faith (1 Timothy vi. 9, 10). And yet, the more an avaricious man gets, the less he spends. To nurse his treasure, to gaze on it (Ecclesiasticus v. 9, 10), to be thinking of it all day and night long, when obliged to go from home, that is what he lives for. And his money becomes, at last, his idol (Ephesians v. 5; Colossians iii. 5). Yes, Mammon is not merely his master whose commands are obeyed before all others, but it is his god before which he sacrifices friends, relatives, country and himself, for he devotes, and, as it is said in Ecclesiasticus, throws his whole soul and body away to his idol (Ecclesiasticus x. 10). Let us not be astonished at our Gospel declaring that God and Mammon are irreconcilable enemies, for who was it but Mammon that had our Lord Jesus sacrificed on its hateful altar for thirty pieces of silver? Of all the devils in Hell, is there one whose hideous guilt is deeper than the fallen angel who prompted Judas to sell the Son of God to his executioners? It is the avaricious who alone can boast of deicide! The vile love of money which the Apostle defines as the root of all evils (1 Timothy vi. 10) can lay claim to having produced the greatest crime that was ever perpetrated!

But, without going into such crimes as made the authors of the inspired books of even the Old Testament say that nothing is more wicked than the covetous man... there is not a more wicked thing than to love money (Ecclesiasticus x. 9, 10), it is easy to allow oneself to be led, as regards this world’s goods, into an excessive solicitude, that is, into one which prudence condemns. What ineffable truth and clearness are there not in the reasoning of our Jesus as put before us in today’s Gospel! To attempt to add any human words to these of His would be an insult offered to both their charm and their energy. The exquisitely beautiful comparisons of the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, by which our divine Master shows how such solicitude is the very opposite of the confidence we should have in our heavenly Father, are beyond all comment. We may just add that solicitude of this sort would prove the existence of an attachment to earthly things which is incompatible with anything approaching to Christian perfection, or to the desire of making progress in the paths of divine Union. The Unitive Way is possible in every state of life, only there must be one condition observed, and that is, the soul must be detached from every tie that could keep her from going to God. The Religious breaks these ties by his three vows which are in direct opposition to the triple concupiscence of fallen nature. The layman, who, though he is living in the world, desires to be what His Creator would have him be, must, without the aid of the real separation which the Religious makes, be quite as completely detached from his own will, and sensuality, and riches, in order that all his intentions and aspirations may be fixed on the eternal home where his one infinite loved Treasure is. If he does not bring himself, even in the midst of his riches, to be as poor in spirit as the Religious is in deed, his progress will be checked at the very first step he takes in the contemplative life. And, if he allow the obstacle to block up the way, he must give up all idea of rising, in light and love, above the lowly paths of the majority of Christians.

29 AUGUST – THE DECOLLATION OF SAINT JOHN THE BAPTIST

Gospel – Mark vi. 17‒29

At that time, Herod sent and apprehended John, and bound him in prison for the sake of Herodias, the wife of Philip his brother, because he had married her. For John said to Herod, “it is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.” Now Herodias laid snares for him, and was desirous to put him to death, and could not. For Herod feared John, knowing him to be a just and holy man, and kept him, and when he heard him did many things, and he heard him willingly. And when a convenient day was come, Herod made a supper for his birthday, for the princes, and tribunes, and chief men of Galilee. And when the daughter of the same Herodias had come in, and had danced, and pleased Herod, and them that were at table with him, the king said to the damsel, “Ask of me what you will, and I will give it you.” And he swore to her,” Whatever you will ask, I will give you, though it be the half of my kingdom.” Who, when she was gone out, said to her mother, “What shall I ask?” But she said, “the head of John the Baptist.” And when she was come in immediately with haste to the king, she asked, saying, “I will that forthwith you give me in a dish the head of John the Baptist.” And the king was struck sad. Yet because of his oath, and because of them who were with him at table he would not displease her. But sending an executioner he commanded that his head should be brought in a dish. And he beheaded him in the prison, and brought his head in a dish, and gave it to the damsel, and the damsel gave it to her mother. Which this his disciples hearing, came and took his body and laid it in a tomb.

Praise be to you, O Christ.

Dom Prosper Guéranger:

Thus died the greatest of them that are born of women: without witnesses, the prisoner of a petty tyrant, the victim of the vilest of passions, the wages of a dancing girl! Rather than keep silence in the presence of crime, although there was no hope of converting the sinner or give up his liberty, even when in chains: the herald of the Word made flesh was ready to die. How beautiful, as Saint John Chrysostom remarks, is this liberty of speech when it is truly the liberty of God’s Word, when it is an echo of Heaven’s language! Then, indeed, it is a stumbling-block to tyranny, the safeguard of the world and of God’s rights, the bulwark of a nation’s honour as well as of its temporal and eternal interests. Death has no power over it. To the weak murderer of John the Baptist, and to all who would imitate him to the end of time, a thousand tongues instead of one, repeat in all languages and in all places: “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.”

“O great and admirable mystery!” cries out Saint Augustine. “He must increase, but I must decrease, said John, said the Voice which personified all the voices that had gone before announcing the Father’s Word Incarnate in his Christ. Every word, in that it signifies something, in that it is an idea, an internal word, is independent of the number of syllables, of the various letters and sounds. It remains unchangeable in the heart that conceives it, however numerous may be the words that give it outward existence, the voices that utter it, the languages, Greek, Latin and the rest, into which it may be translated. To him who knows the word, expressions and voices are useless. The Prophets were voices, the Apostles were voices. Voices are in the Psalms, voices in the Gospel. But let the Word come, the Word who was in the beginning, the Word who was with God, the Word who was God. When we will see Him as He is, will we hear the Gospel repeated? Will we listen to the Prophets? Will we read the Epistles of the Apostles? The Voice fails where the Word increases... Not that in Himself the Word can either diminish or increase. But He is said to grow in us, when we grow in Him. To him, then, who draws near to Christ, to him who makes progress in the contemplation of Wisdom, words are of little use. Of necessity they tend to fail altogether. Thus the ministry of the voice falls short in proportion as the soul progresses towards the Word. It is thus that Christ must increase and John decrease. The same is indicated by the decollation of John, and the exaltation of Christ upon the Cross, as it had already been shown by their birthdays for, from the birth of John the days begin to shorten, and from the birth of our Lord they begin to grow longer.”

The holy Doctor here gives a useful lesson to those who guide souls along the path of perfection. If, from the very beginning, they must respectfully observe the movements of grace in each of them in order to second the Holy Ghost and not to supplant him, so also in proportion as these souls advance, the directors must be careful not to impede the Word by the abundance of their own speech. Moreover, they must discreetly respect the ever-growing powerlessness of those souls to express what our Lord is working in them. Happy to have led the bride to the Bridegroom, let them learn to say with John: “He must increase, but I must decrease.”

The sacred cycle itself seems to convey to us too a similar lesson for, during the following days, we will see its teaching as it were tempered down, by the fewness of the feasts and the disappearance of great solemnities until November. The school of the holy Liturgy aims at adapting the soul more surely and more fully than could any other school to the interior teaching of the Spouse. Like John, the Church would be glad to let God alone speak always, if that were possible here below. At least, towards the end of the way, she loves to moderate her voice, and sometimes even to keep silence, in order to give her children an opportunity of showing that they know how to listen inwardly to Him who is both her and their sole love. Let those who interpret her thought first understand it well. The friend of the Bridegroom, who, until the Nuptial day walked before him, now stands and listens. And the voice of the Bridegroom, which silences his own, fills him with immense joy: “This my joy therefore is fulfilled,” said the Precursor (John iii. 29).

Thus the feast of the Decollation of Saint John may be considered as one of the landmarks of the Liturgical Year. With the Greeks it is a holiday of obligation. Its great antiquity in the Latin Church is evidenced by the mention made of it in the Martyrology called Saint Jerome’s, and by the place it occupies in the Gelasian and Gregorian Sacramentaries. The Precursor’s blessed death took place about the feast of the Pasch, but that it might be more freely celebrated, this day was chosen on which his sacred head was discovered at Emesa.

The vengeance of God fell heavily upon Herod Antipas. Josephus relates bow he was overcome by the Arabian Aretea, whose daughter he had repudiated in order to follow his wicked passions, and the Jews attributed the defeat to the murder of Saint John. He was deposed by Rome from his tetrarchate, and banished to Lyons in Gaul, where the ambitious Herodias shared his disgrace. As to her dancing daughter Salome, there is a tradition gathered from ancient authors that, having gone out one winter day to dance on a frozen river, she fell through into the water. The ice, immediately closing round her neck, cut off her head, which bounded upon the surface, thus continuing for some moments the dance of death.

From Macherontis, beyond the Jordan, where their master had suffered martyrdom, John’s disciples carried his body to Sebaste (Samaria), out of the territory of Antipas. It was necessary to save it from the profanations of Herodias who had not spared his august head. The wretched woman did not think her vengeance complete till she had pierced with a hairpin the tongue that had not feared to utter her shame. And that face, which for seven centuries the church of Amiens has offered to the veneration of the world, still bears traces of the violence inflicted by her in her malicious triumph. In the reign of Julian the Apostate, the pagans wished to complete the work of this unworthy descendant of the Machabees by opening the Saint’s tomb at Sebaste in order to burn and scatter his remains. But the empty sepulchre continued to be a terror to the demons, as Saint Paula attested with deep emotion a. few years later. Moreover, some of precious relics were saved, and dispersed throughout the East. Later on, especially at the time of the Crusades, they were brought into the West where many churches glory in possessing them.

Also on this day according to the ROMAN MARTYROLOGY:

At Rome, on the Aventine Hill, the birthday of St. Sabina, martyr. Sabina, the daughter of Herod Metallarius and wife of the Roman senator Valentinus, was converted to Christianity by her young female Greek slave Serapia. For this Serapia was condemned to death and was executed in 119 AD. Sabina took her body and buried it. Sabina, in turn, was brought before Hadrian and was martyred in 126 AD. At first the bodies of Saints Sabina and Serapia were buried in the Vindician field, but in 430 AD their relics were translated to the Basilica built on the Aventine.

Also at Rome, St. Candida, virgin and martyr, whose body was transferred to the church of St. Praxedes by Pope Paschal I.

At Antioch in Syria, the birthday of the holy martyrs Nicaeas and Paul.

At Constantinople, the holy martyrs Hypatius, an Asiatic bishop, and Andrew, a priest, who for the worship of holy images, under Leo the Isaurian, after having their beards besmirched with pitch and set on fire, and the skin of their heads torn off, were beheaded.

At Perugia, St. Euthymius, a Roman, who fled from the persecution of Diocletian with his wife and his son Crescentius, and there rested in the Lord.

At Metz, St. Adelphus, bishop and confessor.

At Paris, the demise of St. Merry, priest.

In England, St. Sebbi, king.

At Smyrna, the birthday of St. Basilla.

In the vicinity of Troyes, St. Sabina, a virgin, celebrated for virtues and miracles.

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

Thanks be to God.

28 AUGUST – SAINT AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO (Bishop, Confessor and Doctor)

Augustine (Aurelius Augustinus) was born in the northern African city of Tagaste (now in Algeria) in 354. He was signed with the cross by his pious and virtuous Christian mother and enrolled as a catachumen. Aa a child he was so apt in learning that in a short time he far surpassed in knowledge all those of his own age. After recovering from a serious illness he deferred being baptised into the faith. He moved to Carthage to study there, took a mistress who bore him a son and embraced Manichaeism, a Persian gnostic religion which Pope Saint Leo I (Leo the Great) described as “a general compound of all errors and ungodlinesses.” Manichaeism spread quickly and widely in the fourth century.

His studies completed, he returned to Tagaste to teach grammar but soon afterwards went back to Carthage to teach rhetoric. After writing a work on aesthetics he began to doubt and repudiate Manichaeism which claimed that the Christian scriptures had been falsified. Augustine failed to find in it the science of the laws of nature which he he had sought. In 383 he secretly travelled to Rome and set up a school of rhetoric but gave up the venture when his students defrauded him of his tuition fees. Attracted by a vacant teaching position in Milan, he moved there and came under the influence of Ambrose, Bishop of Milan. Monica, having followed Augustine to Rome, joined him in Milan and continued to pray earnestly for his conversion. On the eve of Easter in 387, Augustine was baptised by Ambrose in the Cathedral of Milan. It was on this occasion, so it is said, that the solemn hymn Te Deum was composed and chanted for the first time.

Later that year Augustine returned to Rome with his mother Saint Monica and was preparing to leave for Africa when she took ill and died in Ostia. On his return to Africa he lived in solitude for three years, and was then consecrated Bishop of Hippo. He was always most humble and most temperate. His clothing and his bed were of the simplest kind. He kept a frugal table, which was always seasoned by reading or holy conversation. Such was his loving kindness to the poor that when he had no other resource he broke up the sacred vessels for their relief. He avoided all intercourse and conversation with women, even with his sister and his niece, for he used to say that though such near relations could not give rise to any suspicion, yet might the women who came to visit them.

Never did he omit to preach the word of God except when seriously ill. He pursued heretics unremittingly both in public disputations and in his writings, never allowing them to take a foothold anywhere. By these means he freed Africa entirely from the Manichees, Donatists and other heretics. His numerous works were full of piety, deep wisdom and eloquence, and throw the greatest light on Christian doctrine so that he is the great master and guide of all those who later on reduced theological teaching to method. While the Vandals were devastating Africa, and Hippo had been besieged by them for three months, Augustine was seized with a fever. When he realised that his death was near, he had the Penitential Psalms of David placed before him and used to read them with abundant tears. He was accustomed to say that no one, even though not conscious to himself of any sin, ought to be presumptuous enough to die without repentance. He was in full possession of his faculties and intent on prayer until the end. Augustine died in 430 AD at the age of 76. For writing his Confessions, City of God and other great theological works he was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church by Pope Boniface VIII in 1298. Saint Augustine is the patron of theologians.

Dom Prosper Guéranger:

Today Augustine, the greatest and the humblest of the Doctors is hailed by Heaven where his conversion caused greater joy than that of any other sinner, and is celebrated by the Church who is enlightened by his writings as to the power, the value, and the gratuitousness of divine grace.

Since that wonderful, heavenly conversation at Ostia, God had completed His triumph in the son of Monica’s tears and of Ambrose’s holiness. Far away from the great cities where pleasure had seduced him, the former rhetorician now cared only to nourish his soul with the simplicity of the Scriptures, in silence and solitude. But grace, after breaking the double chain that bound his mind and his heart, was to have a still greater dominion over him. The pontifical consecration was to consummate Augustine’s union with that divine Wisdom whom alone he declared he loved “for her own sole sake, caring neither for rest nor life save on her account.” From this height to which the divine mercy had raised him, let us hear him pouring out his heart: “Too late have I loved you, O beauty so ancient and yet so new! Too late have I loved you! And behold you were within me, and I, having wandered out of myself, sought you everywhere without... I questioned the Earth and she answered me: ‘I am not the one you seek,’ and all the creatures of earth made the same reply. I questioned the sea and its abysses and all the living things in it, and they answered: ‘We are not your God. Seek above us.’ I questioned the restless winds, and all the air with its inhabitants replied: ‘Anaximenes is mistaken, I am not God.’ I questioned the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars, and they said: ‘We are not the God whom you seek.’ And I said to all these things that stand without at the gates of my senses: ‘You have all confessed concerning my God that you are not He, tell me now something about Him.’ And they all cried with one great voice: ‘It is He that made us.’ I questioned them with my desires, and they answered by their beauty. Let the air and the waters and the earth be silent! Let man keep silence in his own soul! Let him pass beyond his own thought, for beyond all language of men or of Angels, He, of whom creatures speak, makes Himself heard; where signs and images and figurative visions cease, there Eternal Wisdom reveals herself. You called and cried so loud that my deaf ears could hear you. You shone didst shine so brightly that my blind eyes could see you. Your fragrance exhilarated me and it is after you that I aspire. Having tasted you I hunger and thirst. You touched me and thrilled me and I burn to be in your peaceful rest. When I will be united to you with my whole being, then will my sorrows and labours cease.”

To the end of his life Augustine never ceased to fight for the truth against all the heresies then invented by the father of lies. In his ever repeated victories, we know not which to admire most: his knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, his powerful logic, or his eloquence. We see too that divine charity which, while inflexibly upholding every iota of God’s rights, is full of ineffable compassion for the unhappy beings who do not understand those rights. “Let those be hard on you who do not know "what labour it is to reach the truth and turn away from error. Let those be hard on you who know not how rare a thing it is, and how much it costs, to overcome the false images of the senses and to dwell in peace of soul. Let those be hard on you who know not with what difficulty man’s mental eye is healed so as to be able to gaze on the Sun of justice, who know not through what sighs and groans one attains to some little knowledge of God. Let those finally, be hard on you who have never known seduction like that by which you are deceived... As for me, who have been tossed about by the vain imaginations of which my mind was in search, and who have shared your misery and so long deplored it, I could not by any means be harsh to you.”

These touching words were addressed to the disciples of Manes who were hemmed in on all sides even by the laws of the pagan emperors. How fearful is the misery of our fallen race when the darkness of Hell can overpower the loftiest intellects! Augustine, the formidable opponent of heresy, was for nine years previously the convinced disciple and ardent apostle of Manicheism. This heresy was a strange variety of Gnostic dualism which to explain the existence of evil made a god of evil itself, and which owed its prolonged influence to the pleasure taken in it by Satan’s pride.

Augustine sustained also a prolonged though more local struggle against the Donatists whose teaching was based on a principle as false as the fact from which it professed to originate. This fact, which on the petitions presented by the Donatists themselves was juridically proved to be false, was that Caecilianus, primate of Africa in 311, had received episcopal consecration from a traditor, i. e. one who had delivered up the sacred Books in time of persecution. No one, argued the Donatiete, could communicate with a sinner without himself ceasing to form part of the Book of Christ. Therefore, the bishops of the rest of the world had continued to communicate with Caecilianus and his successors, the Donatists alone were now the Church. This groundless schism was established among most of the inhabitants of Roman Africa, with its four hundred and ten bishops, and its troops of Circumcellions ever ready to commit murder and violence on the Catholics on the roads or in isolated houses. The greater part of our Saint’s time was occupied in trying to bring back these lost sheep. We must not imagine him studying at his ease in the peace of a quiet episcopal city chosen as if for the purpose by Providence, and there writing those precious works whose fruits the whole world has enjoyed even to our days. There is no fecundity on Earth without sufferings and trials, known sometimes to men, sometimes to God alone. When the writings of the Saints awaken in us pious thoughts and generous resolutions, we must not be satisfied, as we might in the case of profane books, with admiring the genius of the authors, but think with gratitude of the price they paid for the supernatural good produced in our souls. Before Augustine’s arrival in Hippo, the Donatists were so great a majority of the population that, as he himself informs us, they could even forbid anyone to bake bread for Catholics.

When the saint died, things were very different. But the pastor who had made it his first duty to save, even in spite of themselves, the souls confided to him, had been obliged to spend his days and nights in this great work, and had more than once run the risk of martyrdom. The leaders of the schismatics, fearing the force of his reasoning even more than his eloquence, refused all intercourse with him. They declared that to put Augustine to death would be a praiseworthy action which would merit for the perpetrator the remission of his sins.

“Pray for us,” he said at the beginning of his episcopate, “pray for us who live in so precarious a state, as it were between the teeth of furious wolves. These wandering sheep, obstinate sheep, are offended because we run after them, as if their wandering made them cease to be ours. ‘Why do you call us?’ they say. ‘Why do you pursue us?’ But the very reason of our cries and our anguish is that they are running to their ruin. ‘If I am lost, if I die, what is it to you? And what do you want with me?’ ‘What I want is to call you back from your wandering. What I desire is to snatch you from death.’ ‘But what if I will to wander? What if I will to be lost?’ ‘You will to wander? You will to be lost? How much more earnestly do I wish it not!’ Yes, I dare to say it, I am importunate, for I hear the Apostle saying: ‘Preach the word: be instant in season, out of season (2 Timothy iv. 2). In season, when they are willing, out of season, when they are unwilling.’ Yes then, I am importunate: ‘you will to perish, I will it not. And He wills it not, who threatened the shepherds saying: That which was driven away you not brought again, neither have got sought that which was lost (Ezechiel xxxiv. 4). Am I to fear you more than Him? I fear you not. The tribunal of Donatus cannot take the place of Christ‘s judgement seat, before which we must all appear. Whether you will it or not, I will call back the wandering sheep, I will seek the lost sheep. The thorns may tear me, but however narrow the opening may be, it will not check my pursuit. I will beat every bush, as long as the Lord gives me strength: so only I can get to you wherever you strive to perish.”

Driven into their last trenches by such unconquerable charity, the Donatists replied by massacring clerics and faithful, since they could not touch Augustine himself. The bishop implored the imperial judges not to inflict mutilation or death on the murderers lest the triumph of the martyrs should be sullied by such a vengeance. Such mildness was certainly worthy of the Church, but it was destined to be one day brought forward against her in contrast to certain other facts of her history, by a school of liberalism that can grant rights and even pre-eminence to error. Augustine acknowledges his first idea to have been that constraint should not be used to bring any one into the unity of Christ. He believed that preaching and free discussion should be the only arms employed for the conversion of heretics. But on the consideration of what was taking place before his eyes, the very logic of his charity brought him over to the opinion of his more ancient colleagues in the episcopate.

“Who,” he says, “could love us more than God does? Nevertheless God makes use of fear in order to save us, although he teaches us with sweetness. When the Father of the family wanted guests for his banquet, did he not send his servants to the highways and hedges, to compel all they met to come in? This banquet is the unity of Christ‘s Body. If, then, the divine goodness has willed that, at the fitting time, the faith of Christian kings should recognise this power of the Church, let the heretics brought back from the by-ways, and schismatics forced into their enclosures, consider not the constraint they suffer, but the banquet of the Lord to which they would not otherwise have attained. Does not the shepherd sometimes use threats and sometimes blows to win back to the master’s fold the sheep that have been enticed out of it? Severity that springs from love is preferable to deceitful gentleness. He who binds the delirious man, and wakes up the sleeper from his lethargy, molests them both, but for their good. If a house were on the point of falling, and our cries could not induce those within to come out, would it not be cruelty not to save them by force in spite of themselves? and that, even if we could snatch only one, from death, because the rest, seeing it, obstinately hastened their own destruction: as the Donatists do, who in their madness commit suicide to obtain the crown of martyrdom. No one can become good in spite of himself. Nevertheless, the rigorous laws of which they complain bring deliverance not only to individuals, but to whole cities, by freeing them from the bonds of untruth and causing them to see the truth, which the violence or the deceits of the schismatics had hidden from their eyes. Far from complaining, their gratitude is now boundless and their joy complete. Their feasts and their chants are unceasing.”

Meanwhile the justice of Heaven was falling on the queen of nations. Rome, after the triumph of the Cross, had not profited of God’s merciful delay. Now she was expiating under the hand of Alaric the blood of the Saints which she had shed before her idols. “Go out from her my people” (Apocalypse xviii. 4). At this signal the city was evacuated. The roads were all lined with barbarians, and happy was the fugitive who could succeed in reaching the sea, there to entrust to the frailest skiff the honour of his family and the remains of his fortune. Like a bright beacon shining through the storms, Augustine, by his reputation, attracted to the African coast the best of the unfortunates. His varied correspondenoe shows us the new links then formed by God, between the Bishop of Hippo and so many noble exiles. At one time he would send, as far as Nola in Campania, charming messages, mingled with learned questions and luminous answers, to greet his “dear lords and venerable brethren, Paulinus and Therasia, his fellow disciples in the school of our Lord Jesus.” Again it was to Carthage or even nearer home, that his letters were directed, to console, instruct and fortify Albina, Melania and Pinianus, but especially Proba and Juliana, the illustrious grandmother and mother of a still more illustrious daughter, the virgin Demetrias, the greatest in the Roman world for nobility and wealth, and Augustine’s dear conquest to the heavenly Spouse. “Oh! who,” he wrote on hearing of her consecration to our Lord, “who could worthily express the glory added this day to the family of the Anicii. For years it has ennobled the world by the consuls its sons, but now it gives virgins to Christ! Let others imitate Demetrias. Whoever ambitions the glory of this illustrious family, let him take holiness for his portion!” Augustine’s desire was magnificently realised, when, less than a century later, the gens Anicii gave to the world Scholastica and Benedict who were to lead into intimate familiarity and union with God so many souls eager for true nobility.

When Rome fell, the shook was felt throughout the provinces and even beyond. Augustine tells us how he, a descendant of the ancient Numidians, groaned and wept in his almost inconsolable grief. So great, even in her decadence, was the universal esteem and love for the queen city through the secret action of him who was holding out to her new and higher destinies. Meanwhile the terrible crisis furnished the occasion for Augustine’s most important writings.

The City of God was an answer to the still numerous partisans of idolatry who attributed the misfortunes of the empire to the suppression of the false gods. In this great work he refutes, in the most complete and masterly way, the theology and also the philosophy of Roman and Grecian paganism. He then proceeds to set forth the origin, the history and the end of the two cities, the earthly and the heavenly, which divide the world between them, and which are founded upon “two opposite loves: the love of self even to the despising of God, and the love of God even to the despising of self.” But Augustine’s greatest triumph was that which earned for him the title of the Doctor of grace. His favourite prayer: Da quod jubes, et jube quod vis, (Lord give me grace to do what you command, and command what you will) toffended the pride of a certain British monk whom the events of the year 410 had led into Africa. This was Pelagius who taught that nature, all-powerful for good, was quite capable of working out salvation, and that Adam’s sin injured himself alone, and was not passed down to his posterity. We can well understand Augustine who owed so much to the Divine mercy, feeling so strong an aversion for a system whose authors seemed to say to God: “You made us men, but it is we that justify ourselves.”

In this new campaign no injuries were spared to the former convert, but they were his joy and his hope. He had already said, with regard to similar arguments adduced by other adversaries: “Catholics, my beloved brethren, one flock of the one Shepherd, I care not how the enemy may insult the watch-dog of the fold. It is not for my own defence, but for yours, that I must bark. Yet I must needs tell this enemy that, as to my former wanderings and errors, I condemn them, as everyone else does. I can but see therein the glory of Him who has delivered me from myself. When I hear my former life brought forward, no matter with what intention it is done, I am not so ungrateful as to be afflicted thereat, for the more they show up my misery, the more I praise my physician.” While he made so little account of himself, his reputation was spreading throughout the world by reason of the victory he had won for grace. “Honour to you,” wrote the aged Saint Jerome from Bethlehem. “Honour to the man whom the raging winds have not been able to overthrow... Continue to be of good courage. The whole world celebrates your praises. The Catholics venerate and admire you as the restorer of the ancient faith. But, what is a mark of still greater glory, all the heretics hate you. They honour me too, with their hatred. Not being able to strike us with the sword, they kill us in desire.”

These lines reveal the intrepid combatant with whom we will make acquaintance in September, and who, soon after writing them, was laid to rest in the sacred cave near which he had taken refuge. Augustine had yet some years to continue the good fight, to complete the exposition of Catholic in contradiction to some even holy persons who were inclined to think that at least the beginning of salvation, the desire of faith, did not require the special assistance of God. This was semi-pelagianism. A century later (629) the second Council of Orange, approved by Rome and hailed by the whole Church, closed the struggle, taking its definitions from the writings of the bishop of Hippo. Augustine himself, however, thus concluded his last work: “Let those who read these things give thanks to God, if they understand them. If not, let them pray to the teacher of our souls, to Him whose shining produces knowledge and understanding. Do they think that I err? Let them reflect again and again, lest perhaps they themselves be mistaken. As for me, when the readers of my works instruct and correct me, I see therein the goodness of God. Yes, I ask it as a favour, especially of the learned ones in the Church, if by chance this book should fall into their hands, and they deign to take notice of what I write.”

But let us return to the privileged people of Hippo, won over by Augustine’s devotedness, even more than by his admirable discourses. His door was open to every comer, and he was ever ready to listen to the requests, the sorrows and the disputes of his children. Sometimes, at the instance of other churches, and even of councils, requiring of Augustine a more active pursuit of works of general interest, an agreement was made between the flock and the pastor that on certain days of the week no one should interrupt him. But the convention could not last long. Whoever wished could claim the attention of this loving and humble shepherd, beside whom the little ones especially knew well that they would never meet with a refusal. As an instance of this we may mention the fortunate child who, wishing to correspond with the bishop but not daring to take the initiative, received from him the touching letter which may be seen in his works.

Besides all his other glories, our saint was the institutor of monastic life in Roman Africa, by the monasteries he founded, and in which he lived before he became bishop. He was a legislator by his letter to the virgins of Hippo, which became the Rule on which so many servants and handmaids of our Lord have formed their religious life. Lastly, together with the clerics of his church who lived with him a common life of absolute poverty, he was the example and the head of the great family of Regular Canons.

WHAT a death was yours, O Augustine, receiving on your humble couch nothing but news of disaster and ruin! Your Africa was perishing at the hands of the barbarians, in punishment of those nameless crimes of the ancient world in which she had so large a share. Together with Genseric, Arius triumphed over that land, which nevertheless, thanks to you, was to produce, for yet a hundred years, admirable martyrs for the Consubstantiality of the Word. When Belisarius restored her to the Roman world, God seemed to be offering her, for the martyrs’ sake, an opportunity of returning to her former prosperity. But the inexperienced Byzantines, pre-occupied with their theological quarrels and political intrigues, knew not how to raise her up, nor to protect her against an invasion more terrible than the first, and the torrent of Mussulman infidelity soon swept all before it. At length, after twelve centuries, the Cross appeared in those places where the very names of so many flourishing churches had perished.

During all that long night which overhung your native land, your influence did not cease Throughout the entire world your immortal works were enlightening the minds of men and arousing their love. In the basilicas served by your sons and imitators, the splendour of divine worship, the pomp of the ceremonies, the perfection of sacred melodies, kept up in the hearts of the people the same supernatural enthusiasm which took possession of your own, when, for the first time in our West, Saint Ambrose instituted the alternate chanting of the Psalms and sacred Hymns. Throughout all ages the perfect life, in its many different ways of exercising the double precept of charity, draws from the waters of your fountains. Continue to illumine the Church with your incomparable light. Bless the numerous religious families which claim your illustrious patronage. Assist us all, by obtaining for us the spirit of love and of penance, of confidence and of humility, which befits the redeemed soul. Give us to know the weakness of our nature and its unworthiness since the Fall, and at the same time the boundless goodness of our God, the superabundance of His Redemption, the all-powerfulness of his grace. May we all, like you, not only recognise the truth, but be able loyally and practically to say to God: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is ill at ease till it rests in you.”

According to the most ancient monuments of the Roman Church, another Saint has always been honoured on this same day, viz: Hermes, a Roman magistrate, who bore witness to Christ under Trajan. The crypt constructed, less than half a century after the death of the Apostles, to receive this martyr’s relice, is remarkable for its majestic and ample proportions not usually found in the subterranean cemeteries. It was his sister Theodora, who received from Balbina, daughter of the tribune Quirinus, the venerable chains of Saint Peter.

Also on this day according to the ROMAN MARTYROLOGY:

At Rome, the birthday of St. Hermes, an illustrious man, who, as we read in the Acts of the blessed Pope Alexander, was first confined in prison, and afterwards ended his martyrdom by the sword under the judge Aurelian.

At Brioude in Auvergne, St. Julian, martyr, during the persecution of Diocletian. Being the companion of the blessed tribune Ferreol, and secretly serving Christ under a military garb, he was arrested by the soldiers and killed in a barbarous manner by having his throat cut.

At Coutances in France, St. Pelagius, martyr, who received the crown of martyrdom under the emperor Numerian and the judge Evilasius.

At Salerno, the holy martyrs Fortunatus, Caius, and Anthes, beheaded under the emperor Diocletian and the proconsul Leontius.

At Constantinople, the holy bishop Alexander, an aged and celebrated man, through whose efficacious prayers Arius, by the judgement of God, burst asunder and exposed his intestines.

At Saintes, St. Vivian, bishop and confessor.

Also St. Moses, an Ethiopian, who gave up a life of robbery and became a renowned anchoret. He converted many robbers and led them to a monastery.

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

Thanks be to God.