Catholic Saints & Feasts

June 5: Saint Boniface, Bishop and Martyr
c. 675–754
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of Germany

Pagans cut down a man of action in his grey hairs

In the treasury of the Cathedral of Fulda, Germany, there is a medieval Codex, a large, bound book of prayers and theological documents, which very likely belonged to Saint Boniface. The rough cover of the Codex is deeply sliced with cuts from a sword. A tradition dating back to the generations just after Saint Boniface’s own time attests that he wielded this very book like a shield to ward off the blows of robbers who attacked him and a large band of missionaries in Northern Germany in 754. Our saint tried to protect himself, both metaphorically and literally, with the written truths of our faith. It was to no avail. Saint Boniface and fifty-two of his companions were slaughtered. Ransacking the baggage of the missionaries for treasure, the band of thieves found no gold vessels or silver plates but only sacred texts the unlettered men couldn’t read. Thinking them worthless, they left these books on the forest floor, to be recovered later by local Christians. The Codex eventually made it into the Treasury at Fulda where it is found today. One of the earliest images of Saint Boniface, from a Sacramentary dating to 975, depicts the saint deflecting the blows of a sword with a large, thick book. The Codex is a second-class relic, giving silent witness to the final moments of a martyr.

Saint Boniface is known as the “Apostle of the Germans” and is buried in the crypt of Fulda Cathedral. However, his baptismal name was Winfrid, and he was born and raised in Anglo-Saxon England. He was from an educated family, entered a local monastery as a youth, and was ordained a priest at the age of thirty. In 716 Winfrid sailed to the continent to become a missionary to the peoples on the Baltic coast of today’s Northern Germany. He was able to communicate with them because his Anglo-Saxon tongue was similar to the languages of the native Saxon and Teutonic tribes. Winfrid was among the first waves of those many Irish and Anglo-Saxon monks who saved what could be saved of Roman and Christian culture in Europe after the Roman Empire collapsed. Large migrations of Gothic peoples, mostly Arian Christians, pagans, or a confusing mix of the two, filled the vacuum created after Roman order disintegrated, and they needed to be inculcated in the faith to rebuild a superior version of the culture they had helped decimate.

Winfrid traveled to Rome the year after first arriving on the continent, where the pope renamed him Boniface and appointed him missionary Bishop of Germany. After this, he never returned to his home country. He set out to the north and proceeded to dig and lay the foundations of Europe as we know it. He organized dioceses, helped found monasteries, baptized thousands, pacified tribes, challenged tree-worshipping pagans, taught, preached, held at least one large Church Council, convinced more Anglo-Saxon monks to follow his lead, ordained priests, appointed bishops, stayed in regular contact with his superiors in Rome, and pushed the boundaries of Christianity to their northernmost limit. Boniface was indefatigable. He was in his late seventies, and still pushing to convert the unconverted, when he was surprised and slain in a remote wilderness.

Saint Boniface was well educated, and many of his letters and related correspondence survive. But he was, above all, a man of action. He was daring and fearless. He was a pathbreaker. His faith moved mountains and tossed them into the sea. His labors, combined with his great faith, are the stuff of legend. More incredibly, though, they are the stuff of truth.

Saint Boniface, through your powerful intercession, help all those who labor for the faith to be as intrepid as you were in challenging those who reject Christ. May your example of tireless witness inspire all missionaries, both at home and abroad, to persevere.

March 9: Saint Frances of Rome, Religious
1384–1440
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White (Violet when Lenten Weekday)
Patron Saint of motorists and widows

Just to be near her was thought a blessing

Today’s saint, born into a wealthy noble family in the Eternal City, was married to a man from a similarly privileged family when she was just thirteen. Saint Frances earnestly sought to do the will of God in serving her husband, her children, and her home while also attempting to live a high level of holiness modeled on the life of a nun. She had desired to enter religious life from a young age, but her father refused to break his promise to give Frances in marriage to a fellow nobleman. Frances struggled with an internal conflict between her married state and the religious state to which she had originally felt called. This was not a choice between a good and a bad option. It was a natural tension in the soul of a holy woman who saw two paths open before her, both of which led to God. After her husband died and her children were grown, Saint Frances did live the ordered life of a religious, albeit outside of a convent.

The divine pull that Saint Frances felt in the direction of two callings was not unusual. Other saints before her had been wives and mothers before becoming religious. The theology of the Church in the twentieth century, ratified by the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, now offers a vision of holiness which resolves much of this tension in trying to discern a vocation. The primary calling of all Christians is imparted through Baptism, fortified in Confirmation, and nourished in reception of Holy Communion. These Sacraments are sufficient armor to fit one for holiness in any and all circumstances. The married life and its natural domestic concerns are, then, as much a theater for holiness as a cloister.

The Church wants all Catholics to understand daily life as its own drama in fulfilling, or rejecting, God’s will. It is not that one is distracted with the details of work, family, domestic chores, and children while the real action takes place in the parish, the monastery, the retreat center, or the convent. The real action is at home, in the domestic church. It is precisely at home where Christians spend most of their time, raise their children, engage with their spouses, and accomplish the multitude of tasks that make life happen. Home and work are not spheres of life. They are life. And it would be absurd to argue that the will of God lies outside of life itself. To say that holiness is for everyone is to say that all of creation is a forum to pursue it, and that no vocation limits the opportunity to accomplish God’s will.

Saint Frances of Rome was a model wife and mother for forty years, often in violent and difficult circumstances provoked by skirmishes related to the Western Schism, the era of more than one pope which divided Rome’s elites into warring factions. Frances’ husband loved and revered her, her servants admired her, and her children adored her. In addition to performing her domestic duties so faithfully, Frances also fasted, prayed, had a vibrant mystical spirituality, and was generous with the poor. Her charity toward the destitute was not the modern charity of making charitable donations. She did the work, not someone else. She herself made personal contact with the homeless, the hungry, and beggars. Her sterling example of piety and service led her to found a group of like-minded women who lived in the world but who bound themselves to a life of prayer and service. The group was later recognized as an Order in the Church under the title the Oblates of Saint Frances of Rome. So, in addition to fulfilling her own duties, Frances also helped similarly high-placed women to avoid lives of frivolousness and mundanity.

Saint Frances of Rome was generous in all things, saw her guardian angel at her side for many years, ate little more than dry bread, and had a provable gift of healing. As her reputation for holiness spread in her later years, to be in her mere presence was considered a blessing by the people of Rome. As wife, mother, and later Oblate, she stretched herself to the limit in seeking out and doing God’s will, precisely as that will was transmitted to her by the Church she loved with such fervor.

Saint Frances of Rome, through your intercession, aid all wives and mothers to live lives of generous service to their families. Help them to serve the domestic Church by creating, and fortifying, that cradle of holiness and culture the Church so needs to flourish.

March 8: Saint John of God, Religious
1495–1550
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White (Violet when Lenten Weekday)
Patron Saint of hospitals, printers, the sick, and alcoholics

He walked the fine line between madness and holiness

There are many “Johns” who are saints, beginning with those found in Scripture itself: Saint John the Baptist, Saint John the Evangelist, Saint John of the Cross, Saint John Fisher, etc. The name John has also been taken by many popes. Today’s John has the title “of God.” It is a simple and direct title. The word “God” conveys everything under God and everything that is God, without distinctions such as “of the Cross,” “of the Holy Name,” or “of the Infant Jesus.” Neither does it carry any hint of a homeland such as “of Assisi,” “of Calcutta,” or “of Padua.” All saints are “of God,” of course, but the plain title “of God” fits the personality, outlook, education, and simplicity of today’s John very well. The name was not given to him posthumously. John said that the Infant Jesus gave him the name in a dream. A Spanish Bishop who personally knew John and his work ordered him to bear this appellation once he knew its divine origins.

Saint John of God did not have the advantage of an excellent education. But what his mind lacked his heart supplied. He left his Portuguese home as a child in the care of a priest and went to neighboring Spain. From there he lived an itinerant life as a farmer, shepherd, adventurer, and then soldier. He travelled the length and breadth of Europe fighting in the service of kings and princes, mostly against Muslim Turks. Many years later he found his way back home and went to see if his parents were still alive. But he had been gone so long, and had left so young, that he could not even remember their names. An uncle told him that they had died. At this point, the wandering John decided to ransom his own freedom to North African Muslims in exchange for Christian hostages. The plan came to nothing and he returned to Southern Spain.

At this, the lowest point of his aimless life, John had a breakthrough, or perhaps a breakdown. He was selling religious books from town to town when he fell under the influence of a saint, John of Ávila. Saints know saints. Upon hearing John of Ávila preach about the martyr Saint Sebastian, and upon receiving his advice in spiritual direction, the wandering John stopped in his tracks. He fasted, he prayed, and he went on pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Extremadura, Spain. So total was his repentance for his past sins that he was placed for a time in a hospital for the mentally ill. But his repentance was real. He changed forever and always and started caring for the kind of person that he used to be.

John somehow raised enough money to start a small hospital and thus began, in an orderly and professional manner, to care for the sick, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, convert the sinner, and shelter the homeless and orphans. He had no equal in giving of himself to his patients, and his reputation for holiness spread across Spain. He gave away his cloaks so often that his Bishop had a habit made, ordered John to put it on, and told him not to give it away. John’s total dedication to the poor and sick drew many followers. They emulated his generosity, and soon an Order was born. The group was eventually approved by the Holy See in 1572 under the title The Brothers Hospitallers of Saint John of God. The Order spread quickly throughout the world, often with the support of the Spanish Crown. Its work on behalf of the poor continues today in numerous countries through hundreds of institutions.

Saint John of God practiced a type of Ignatian spirituality in evaluating his own life. But he was not just a spectator of his life, observing it from the outside. He became a student of himself, evaluated his own errors, listened to advice, stopped what he was doing, changed direction, and charted a new course in middle age. He was, in modern terms, a “late vocation.” He cared little for his own physical health and died on his fifty-fifth birthday while kneeling in prayer before an altar in his room. In some saints there is a fine line between sanctity and madness. Saint John of God straddled that fine line. He became mad for the Lord and was canonized by the Church for his holy madness in serving the poor and the God who loves them.

Saint John of God, help us to follow your example of service to the poor through gift of self. You did not just ask for charitable donations but for charity itself. You did not ask others to do what you did not do yourself. Through your intercession, may all those in need encounter a servant as generous as yourself to satisfy their basic needs.

March 7: Saints Perpetua and Felicity, Martyrs
c. Late Second Century–203
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
(When Lenten Weekday, Optional Memorial; Violet)
Patron Saints of expectant mothers, widows, and butchers

They bled to death as pagan eyes drank in the spectacle

Many centuries ago in the desert lands of North Africa, now populated by millions of the adherents of Islam, there was once a thriving Catholic Church. Dioceses, bishops, theologians, shrines, schools, monasteries, convents, and saints filled the towns hugging the southern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. This vibrant Catholicism generated, and was inspired by, the witness of numerous martyrs. Many of their names are known, among them today’s saints, Felicity and Perpetua. Few documents in Church history can match the raw power of the first-person, eye-witness narrative of the passion of Perpetua and Felicity. It is a gripping account filled with breathtaking dramatic detail. The reader can almost feel the hot sand of the arena warming his feet, a gentle sea breeze caressing his cheeks, and the sweaty crowd pressing against him, their roar for blood echoing through the dry air.

Vivia Perpetua, twenty-two years old, was married, a noblewoman, and a new mother whose baby was still nursing. Her pagan father begged his favorite daughter to renounce her Christian faith, but to no avail. Felicity was a slave and pregnant when jailed. She gave birth a few days before her martyrdom. Her child would be raised by Christian women in Carthage. Perpetua, in her own hand, recorded the events leading up to her martyrdom, while an eyewitness to her death completed the text later.

When they were first thrown into the arena, Perpetua and Felicity were attacked by a rabid heifer, which was chosen because it shared the same sex as its victims. The young women were grievously injured by the mad cow and then momentarily removed from the arena until gladiators were brought in to conclude the day’s spectacle. The executioners carried out their duties quickly, though Perpetua had to guide the gladiator’s sword to her throat after he first painfully struck a bone instead of a vein. As the narration states, “Perhaps such a woman...could not die unless she herself had willed it.” Saints Perpetua and Felicity were imprisoned together, suffered together, and died together in 203 A.D. in Carthage, North Africa, along with other noble martyrs whose names are preserved in the same account.

The vivid description of their deaths was so moving that it was faithfully preserved down through the centuries and has come to us largely intact. Apart from the New Testament writings themselves, only a few documents from the early Church pre-date the passion narrative of Perpetua and Felicity. It invites tantalizing reflection on how many similar firsthand testimonies of famous martyrdoms from the early Church have been lost! What could have been known about the final moments of Saints Paul, Cecilia, Agatha, and so many apostles and popes! The accounts of Perpetua, Felicity, and Polycarp must fire our imagination for all the rest. The Church in North Africa so often read the account of Perpetua and Felicity in its public liturgies that Saint Augustine, a North African bishop living two hundred years after their martyrdoms, had to remind his faithful that the narrative was not on a par with Scripture itself.

The fact that women and slaves, both mothers who loved their children, were willing to die rather than renounce their faith, testifies to the revolutionary message of Jesus Christ. He gave us a true religion. But He also gave us a true anthropology. He has revealed to man his true origins, his high dignity, and his ultimate purpose. Jesus reveals man to himself. So when early Christians, or present-day Christians, understand that they are made in God’s image and likeness, and that His Son died for them as much as He died for anyone else, they stand a little taller. If a Christian is told he is garbage, property, a slave, old, a prisoner, or a foreigner, he shouldn’t flinch at the insult, because under such denigrations is a deeper identity: “child of God,” “made in God’s image and likeness,” and “worthy of the blood of the Lamb.” These are the titles of a citizen of the Kingdom of God, whose shadow covers the earth and comforts all those who live in its shade. Felicity and Perpetua clung to their identity as Christians in the face of imprisonment, ridicule, torture, and pain. The newness of the faith, and the dignity it imparted, fortified them to accept death rather than a return to rough paganism. May our faith be as fresh to us.

Saints Felicity and Perpetua, your martyrdom was an act of bravery, which moved the Christians of your age and continues to move us today. Give all who invoke your names similar courage, fortitude, and faith to overcome timidity in witnessing to Christ in difficult circumstances.

March 4: Saint Casimir
1458–1484
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White (Violet when Lenten Weekday)
Patron Saint of Poland and Lithuania

A prince crowned with humility lives well but not long

Ever since the Three Kings left their gifts at the altar of the crib in Bethlehem, Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, has drawn generations of nobles, kings, and emperors to Himself. Today we commemorate a young man named Casimir, Prince of Poland, who died at the age of twenty-five. Casimir was the third child in a family of thirteen siblings who had everything that life could offer. But it was still not enough, and Casimir knew it. Unlike many wealthy, powerful, educated people, Casimir knew that life did not offer, and could not offer, what the soul most deeply yearned for. He had his head screwed on straight and tight. Casimir never lost sight of the higher things that truly mattered, even though his life was full of the intrigues and cares of war and state.

Any true search is open to finding. A search that begins with the premise that it will never find, or never end, is not really a search. It’s just wandering. A true searcher must be a finder. How many people claim to be searching for the truth, for God, for meaning! Yet when they unearth the elusive treasure, open it up, and see its contents, they are disappointed and move along to search for something else. Why? Perhaps because the treasure made moral demands on them or required that prior life decisions be repudiated or modified. If a searcher sets personal conditions on what he will find, his search will never end. The search will just become a reflection of the searcher’s own personality and desires, not a true quest for something objective outside of himself.

Saint Casimir searched for God as a child, as all youth do. But his search unearthed a treasure early on. What Casimir sought, Poland provided. Casimir imbued so totally what his Catholic birthplace offered that he is considered an emblematic Polish prince: pious, just, chaste, poor, and strong. A country, similar to a religion, is a carrier of meaning. It absorbs and refines, over time, millions of individual searches until it responds to its people’s searches in the form of heroes, flags, hymns, holidays, and statues. A patriot loves his country in the same way that a religious man loves his religion and God. His love is specific. He loves a country, a religion, and a God—and Casimir was no exception.

It is said that behind every great man is a great woman. Saint Casimir never married and preserved his chastity until death, despite offers of marriage. What was behind him was not a great woman but a great nation. Poland was his mistress. The faith and thick traditions of Poland developed over many centuries in response to man’s search for meaning in that great nation. The Polish nation did not understand Poland’s past as an anchor, an imposition, or a burden. Poles understood their nation’s cultural riches as a common inheritance of their ancestors. And Poles were eager to honor their forefathers by faithfully accepting, with gratitude, what they handed down.

The fullness of these traditions was imparted to today’s saint from a young age by his teachers, especially by learned priests who were like second fathers to him. Casimir learned to love the Lord’s Passion, the Sacraments, the Virgin, and the Church. These loves deepened as he matured and personally experienced the harshness and venality of life at court and on the march. He did not need to become a priest or religious in order to live his faith. He remained a layman his entire brief life. In this he presaged the emphasis on lay vocations the Church would promote in the twentieth century. He was a layman, a prince, and a saint. Anything is possible in the Church for those who love God first and foremost.

Saint Casimir, we ask your intercession to aid all leaders of governments, churches, and families to emulate your virtues; to be poor in spirit, just, pure, and faithful. With your aid, may leaders guide those under their authority to love and serve their country and their God with greater fervor.